Statement of the Environmental Law Society re: Grutter v. Bollinger
Boalt Hall School of Law

As firm believers in diversity and affirmative action, the undersigned members of Boalt Hall's Environmental Law Society strongly support fellow students who are traveling to Cincinnati to attend arguments in the Grutter v. Bollinger appeal. This case, which ultimately could determine the fate of affirmative action policies in public universities nationwide, has implications for the teaching and practice of environmental law.

Only in recent years has the environmental movement begun to come to terms with the ways in which pollution, resource extraction, and trade have disproportionate impacts on communities of color, both in the United States and around the world. In this context, affirmative action is extremely important to the environmental movement.

On one level, policies that increase the number of minority students in the nation's law schools will also increase the diversity of environmental law programs, perhaps bringing about a greater sensitivity to issues of racism in the practice of environmental law and the practices of the movement as a whole. On another level, affirmative action represents a complex, critical approach to undoing this nation's racist legacy, one that recognizes that disproportionate racial impacts, even where unintended, are nonetheless also unjust.

In this sense, the fight for affirmative action bears an important resemblance to the efforts of communities of color to combat toxic facilities in their neighborhoods. In both cases, while individual acts of discrimination may not be obvious, disturbing patterns of inequality nonetheless persist because racism is woven into the fabric of our educational and economic institutions. Willful colorblindness will not remove these threads; we must be able to take note of race if we are ever to eliminate racism. Critical remedial approaches like affirmative action are necessary, now more than ever, to achieve the constitutional ideal of equal justice under the law.

Contact:
Kevin Bundy
kpb@boalthall.berkeley.edu