| In the past two years, an inordinate amount of media and institutional attention has been devoted to discussing the implications of the recent University of Michigan cases, i.e., Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, on law school admissions. Timely and important as this is, these rulings cannot be fully understood without a careful historical analysis of a succession of earlier cases.; The focus of this study is to look at those historic cases and, above all, the diffusion of their varied influences on a particular law school, the College of Law at the University of Kentucky. The University of Kentucky is the institutional focus of this study because it represents an institution that is a major law school at a land grant, flagship university, but has been more or less outside the volatile, visible episodes of lawsuits, protests, etc.; In other words, how did these landmark decisions, at the national level, shape and mode the practices and policies at a local setting, given UK's history of racial segregation at the law school prior to the late 1940's. In essence, the objective of this study is an historical examination of UK's College of Law and its affirmative action admission policies during selected time periods corresponding to key legal decisions addressing affirmative action admission programs nationally, ending in the year 2004. The key time frames and corresponding statutes and/or legal decisions are as follows: (1) Plessy v. Ferguson, Berea College v. Commonwealth, the Kentucky Day Law, and the origin of the College of Law (1896-1908). (2) Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Bd of Education of Topeka (1944-1954). (3) The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Executive Order 11246, Regents of the University of California-Davis v. Bakke (1961-1981). (4) Hopwood v. Texas, Smith v. University of Washington, and Grutter v. Bollinger (1992-2004)... |
