A Bulwark against Anarchy: Affirmative Action, Emory Law School, and Southern Self-Help

This article demonstrates that Pre-Start, Emory Law School's affirmative action program from 1966 to 1972, provides a useful case study for refraining the current debate around affirmative action in law school admissions. The author performs post-hoc strict scrutiny on Pre-Start, showing that it meets and exceeds the standard set in the leading affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. The historical context for Pre-Start demonstrates how similar the current arguments against affirmative action in law school admissions are to the arguments used against racial integration of public schools in the first half of the twentieth century. This analysis provides valuable historical context to the current legal and scholarly debates involving affirmative action programs and adds to an understanding of the importance of these programs today.