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Justice Goodwin Liu reexamined seminal affirmative action in higher education legal cases beginning with the landmark 1978 case, "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" and leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in "Gratz v. Bollinger." Liu argued that the "Bakke and Gratz" lawsuits were grounded in an underlying causation fallacy, largely because neither case involved enough applicants of color to change the likelihood of Bakke's and Gratz's admittance. Recent lawsuits from self-identified White and Asian, rejected applicants have emerged against top-ranked universities. This article revisits Liu's assertions by applying his critical approach to those cases. Data indicate too few applicants of color to change the likelihood of recent plaintiffs' admittance. Concluding arguments name Causation Fallacy 2.0 as a useful tool for explaining the cultural politics of race surrounding affirmative action admissions cases.

This article uses critical theoretical methods to reconsider the potential of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" in urban education. It finds "Brown" as a potentially useful tool for coconstructing critical race pedagogy of hope that involves (a) Socratic questioning of the endemic nature of racism and power dynamics of public education and the political discursive innovations of "Brown"; (b) a commitment to justice in urban education for all stakeholders, including stakeholders representing injustices linking race to class and gender; and (c) tragicomic hope--locating, critiquing, and ultimately engaging the action of hope to sustain participation in the struggle for distributive justice in public education.

The late Professor Derrick Bell is renowned as the intellectual architect who drafted the blueprints that guided the initial development of critical race theory (CRT). Prior to the advent of CRT, Professor Bell wrote extensively on initiatives designed to improve the lives of African Americans. Among his most influential scholarship, ‘Serving Two Masters’ from the 1976Yale Law Reviewemerged as a seminal foundational piece for CRT. We found that Bell’s post-Brownlitigation and frustrations were captured in several powerful law review journals from 1970–1976. During this time, he wrote extensively on minority admissions programs, school litigation strategies, racial remediation, equal employment, and of course theBrowndecision and its aftermath. These early works attended to the details of how legal remediation for racism in various forms could be considered and approached, but more often were ignored and denied. These same works showed the contradictions built into legal strategies. By working through the details of specific racial remediation strategies, Derrick Bell realized the ubiquity of the negative influences of post-Brownintegration goals in all aspects of African American life, including the law. His seminal 1976Yale Law Reviewpiece emerged not from theory, per se, but from very specific engagements with reasoning about post-Brownpolicies and practices that failed to serve the interests of most African American families. For Bell, hope seemed to wax and wane as clarity emerged. This article analyses Bell’s law review articles that were published between 1970 and 1976, when he began full-fledged writing that ultimately provided a blueprint for the CRT movement in the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]