Racial preference and racial justice : the new affirmative action controversy /

These 37 articles provide more than an acquaintance necessary for understanding the affirmative action debate from a variety of perspectives. Followers of this debate will find the selections balanced, despite the editor's opposition to race-based systems and his willingness to deviate from meritocracy. The articles are placed in contemporary constitutional and legal contexts and offer easy reading resulting from editorial focuses and brevity of articles. The unusually heavy reliance upon passages of significant Supreme Court decisions enhances accuracy. Justice Scalia's article exemplifies the influence of personal value systems on judicial decision-making. Missing are major Supreme Court decisions such as Johnson and Paradise, addressed in R. Delgado's "The Imperial Scholar," 132, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (March '86), and a discussion about the specific impact on Hispanics. Nieli addresses a white middle-class audience becoming critical of the upper-middle-class white liberal. An appeal by the editor to the application of a universal human principle is reminiscent of rhetoric dating to the Founding Fathers, making it difficult to find consistency in the title as the new affirmative action controversy. Useful index but no bibliography. Upper-division undergraduates. -A. A. Sisneros, Sangamon State University

Affirmative action (AA) as designated here involves a wide variety of government-supported policies which extend preferential consideration (especially in employment) to members of racial groups officially designated as disadvantaged minorities. With the advent of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, which has pared back a number of previously instituted AA programs, the AA issue has again come to the forefront of American consciousness. In this book, Nieli has pulled together a large amount of original source material on the historical, philosophical, and legal background of AA, including the commentary of the various Supreme Court justices on the issue. While this volume is intended primarily for academic collections, to the extent that questions raised by AA touch everyone's lives, it might be an appropriate acquisition for public libraries wishing to develop a collection on public policy concerns.-- Gene R. Laczniak, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.