Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Abstract
For the past forty years, Justice Powell’s concurring opinion in University of California v. Bakke has been at the center of scholarly debates about affirmative action. Notwithstanding the enormous attention Justice Powell’s concurrence has received, scholars have paid little attention to a passage in that opinion that expressly takes up the issue of gender. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, this Essay explains several ways in which its reasoning is flawed. The Essay also shows how interrogating Justice Powell’s “single axis” race and gender analysis raises broader questions about tiers of scrutiny for Black women. Through a hypothetical of a university’s affirmative-action plan that specifically targets Black women, the Essay considers what tier of scrutiny should apply. Because, for the most part, scholars take a race or gender approach to equal protection law, they have not engaged that doctrinal puzzle and its implications for tiers-of-scrutiny writ large.
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Constitutional Law | Education Law | Fourteenth Amendment | Law | Law and Gender
Recommended Citation
Devon W. Carbado & Kimberlé W. Crenshaw,
An Intersectional Critique of Tiers of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches to Equal Protection,
129
Yale L. J. F.
108
(2019).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2816
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Education Law Commons, Fourteenth Amendment Commons, Law and Gender Commons