Jeffrey S. Lehman

Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan

Even as lawsuits challenging its admissions policies made their way through the courts, the University of Michigan carried the torch for affirmative action in higher education.In June 2003, the Supreme Court vindicated UMs position on affirmative action when it ruled that race may be used as a factor for universities in their admissions programs, thus confirming what the UM had argued all along: diversity in the classroom translates to a beneficial and wide-ranging social value. With the green light given to the law schools admissions policies, Defending Diversity validates the positive benefits gained by students in a diverse educational setting.Written by prominent University of Michigan faculty, Defending Diversity is a timely response to the courts ruling. Providing factual background, historical setting, and the psychosocial implications of affirmative action, the book illuminates the many benefits of a diverse higher educational setting -- including preparing students to be full participants in a pluralistic democracy -- and demonstrates why affirmative action is necessary to achieve that diversity.Defending Diversity is a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion on affirmative action in higher education. Perhaps more important, it is a valuable record of the history, events, arguments, and issues surrounding the original lawsuits and the Supreme Courts subsequent ruling, and helps reclaim the debate from those forces opposed to affirmative action.Patricia Gurin is Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. Jeffrey S. Lehman, former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School, is President of Cornell University. Earl Lewis is Dean of Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan.

How Will Welfare Recipients Fare in the Labor Market

SHELDON DANZIGER is Professor of Social Work and Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Faculty Associate at the Population Studies Center. JEFFREY LEHMAN is Professor of Law and Public Policy and Dean of the Law School at the University of Michigan. David Dickinson provided expert computational assistance. President and Congress have ignored what has been learned from the research of the last decade about the labor mar-

Tribute to Jerry Israel

My legal education began with Jerry Israel. During the fall of 1977, I was assigned to his section of Criminal Law. From the very first day of class, Jerry made it clear to us that the problems of crime and punishment were at once profoundly important and elusively difficult. Jerry taught from judicial opinions in the classic Socratic mode. Each day we were forced to grapple with the perplexing manner in which the language of precedent, so comforting when first encountered in the frame of an opinion, turned to quicksilver when tested against new cases, real or hypothetical. We spent our first few weeks on the grisly subject of late-term feticide, attempting to decide what we should think of a legal system that chose to treat it as a different sort of crime than infanticide. We then moved on to a comprehensive stroll through the full landscape of criminalized conduct. Jerry never attempted to offer us a unified field theory. Rather, his mission was only to show us that any authority we might seek to invoke, even the Model Penal Code, could be made to wilt under sustained and rigorous critique. By the end of the semester our band of ninety students a group that had entered brimming with the hubris of moral certainty about criminal conduct emerged with a surprising dose of intellectual humility, sensitized to the paradoxes that attend our collective effort to establish a morally defensible system of state-imposed punishment for the activities we choose to deem criminal. One of the great bits of wisdom passed down from generation to generation of Michigan students concerned Jerrys impossibly difficult final exams. He did not disappoint us. According to the custom of the day, final examinations were typeset, and our criminal law exam could easily have stood upright on a bookshelf. While we were given four hours, we could easily have used twelve. Indeed, few sensations from my past have survived as vividly as the mounting panic I endured just reading through the first question. It was an extended hypothetical where a hypnotically induced, staged assault on the hypnotists spouse was the prelude to guilt-driven revenge and the shooting of an innocent