Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly

Abstract

For our purposes, then a race jurisprudence is not only about voice, but is also, and more fundamentally, about scope, time, focus, method, and transparency. When one looks at the development of Justice Blackmun's race jurisprudence over time, the most central issue is the issue of method. The opinions for which Justice Blackmun is best known are full of a gestalt understanding of how race and racism do their work in American society. But if one looks back to Justice Blackmun's years on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and his opinions in the Supreme Court across a range of issues and across the span of years, one sees that his intuitions did not always register the presence of race, and - more important - that he did not always trust his own intuitions to lead him to the right answer. One finds that Justice Blackmun put considerable energy and faith, in the middle years of his career on the Court, into the formulation and use of formal proof structures and statistical methodologies as methods for revealing the presence of race to those with less-thanreliable intuitive capacities. Only when those methods seemed to him to have failed did the urgent voice of Bakke reemerge.

First Page

73

Volume

26

Publication Date

1998

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