We Won't Go Back; Making the Case for Affirmative Action

xx, 314 pages. Notes. Index. Inscribed by Mari J. Matsuda to Betsy Levin on the Title page. Also signed by Charles Lawrence. Inscription read: To Betsy Levin With thanks for all you've done to bring equality to legal education. Betsy Levin was the first tenured woman on the faculty at Duke Law. Her primary interests focused on education, local government, and constitutional law. While she was on the Duke Law faculty she was also a Residential Fellow at the National Institute of Education and General Counsel at the Department of Education. Levin authored and edited several books on education and school financing such as Future Directions for School Finance Reform in 1975 and The Courts as Educational Policymakers and Their Impact on Federal Programs in 1977. Levin served on several committees on education, educational financing, and women's rights including the ACLU. In 1966 Levin obtained an LL.B. at Yale, where she was Topics Editor of the Yale Law Review. In 1981 Levin became Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, a position she held until 1987. Levin remained on the Colorado faculty until 1993. She served as the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools from 1987 to 1992. Levin continued to teach in a variety of adjunct and visiting professor positions until her retirement in 2009. Reviews the original intent of affirmative action policies and argues for their critical role in the health of American society, emphasizing the need for an expanded and more humane version of affirmative action. Professor Lawrence is best known for his prolific work in antidiscrimination law, equal protection, and critical race theory. Mari J. Matsuda (born 1956) is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. She was the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the United States, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law in 1998 and one of the leading voices in critical race theory since its inception. Matsuda specializes in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights law. In the compassionate yet frank meditation, two of America's leading voices on affirmative action make the convincing case that it is time for a more humane understanding of this controversial policy. Told from the richly personal and occasionally diverging perspectives of an African American man and an Asian American woman, We Won't Go Back offers an impassioned, generous vision for the policy's expansion - one that see affirmative action as a gain for all. Combining personal memoir, careful analysis, and the stories of those who have shaped the policy over the decades, Lawrence and Matsuda reveal what affirmative action has meant in real terms, in people's lives - from the communities that struggled for its initial passage to parents who fight today for their child's fair shot. In the process, the authors eloquently consider some of the policy's most divisive issues: How do African Americans feel about the judicial ascendancy of Clarence Thomas? Why have the majority of women remained silent on affirmative action? Do Asian Americans need the policy? How are issues of hate speech and political correctness tied to it? Perhaps most striking is the human face of affirmative action today, which emerges radiantly from the stories gathered here. We meet Anthony Romero, a Latino raised by his immigrant parents in a Bronx housing project, now director of a prominent human rights organization; Robert Demmons, a trailblazer who successfully tackled discrimination in his local fire department; LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, the first African American woman to become a Superior Court judge in her county; and Bernadette Gross, a carpenter who rose triumphantly in a male-dominated profession. Their tales and others' force the question: Which people are in the room because of.…