Justice Douglas dissent argues for race‑neutral individual assessment in law school admissions

4.2.12 WC: 191694 court’s most liberal member at the time, and a man who had grown up in Washington State, wanted to decide the issue. He wrote a dissenting opinion that represented the conventional liberal view with which I, and many in my generation, had been brought up. He argued that the equal protection clause does not: prohibit law schools from evaluating an applicant's prior achievements in light of the barriers that he had to overcome. A black applicant who pulled himself out of the ghetto into a junior college may thereby demonstrate a level of motivation, perseverance, and ability that would lead a fairminded admissions committee to conclude that he shows more promise for law study than the son of a rich alumnus who achieved better grades at Harvard. That applicant would be offered admission not because he is black, but because as an individual he has shown he has the potential, while the Harvard man may have taken less advantage of the vastly superior opportunities offered him. Because of the weight of the prior handicaps, that black applicant may not realize his full potential in the first year of law school, or even in the full three years, but in the long pull of a legal career his achievements may far outstrip those of his classmates whose earlier records appeared superior by conventional criteria. Such a policy would not be limited to blacks, or Chicanos or Filipinos, or American Indians, although undoubtedly groups such as these may in practice be the principal beneficiaries of it. But a poor Appalachian white, or a second generation Chinese in San Francisco, or some other American whose lineage is so diverse as to defy ethnic labels, may demonstrate similar potential and thus be accorded favorable consideration by the Committee. Justice Douglas was, in fact, describing his own background in Washington State. His autobiography was informing his constitutional ideology, as is often the case. He then went on to distinguish the approach he described from the one employed by the University of Washington law school: The difference between such a policy and the one presented by this case is that the Committee would be making decisions on the basis of individual attributes, rather than according a preference solely on the basis of race. He concluded therefore that since the “clear and central purpose” of the equal protection clause was to “eliminate all official sources of racial discrimination in the states,” it follows that each applicant must be evaluated in “a racially neutral way:” There is no superior person by constitutional standards. A DeFunis who is white is entitled to no advantage by reason of that fact; nor is he subject to any disability, no matter what his race or color. Whatever his race, he had a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner. Douglas thus rejected the schools efforts to achieve “representation” of minorities: 292 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017379