Example 10.4
Takeaway point 10.4: History can validate and help you develop policy arguments.
History can also help you to build powerful policy arguments by exploring the problems or benefits that occurred when our forebears experimented with a rule.
And you don’t need to travel back to the eighteenth century to find useful historical arguments, as we see below. Here is one of the most lauded briefs in recent years: in 2003, senior military officials filed it in defense of affirmative action, which many Court watchers expected that the Court would curtail in a case about a public law school’s admission policy. The case was ultimately decided 5-4 in favor of affirmative action’s supporters, and this filing is widely perceived to have flipped Justice O’Connor’s vote. Justice Stevens later said that the outcome was “significantly influenced” by the “historical context” that this brief supplied.Source: Amicus brief, from Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (some citations omitted).
The brief uses historical data to show that the military’s leadership reflected little diversity. Elsewhere, the brief notes that — because of a successful affirmative action program — “[m]inorities now comprise roughly 19% of all officers,” with African Americans accounting for 8.8% of officers. These figures comport with the brief’s argument that the ability to value diversity in selecting military officers is critical to national security.
The historical record is used to show what happened when no affirmative action existed: national security was threatened, race-based conflict erupted, and morale plummeted.
This is the theme of the brief. (Themes are discussed in Chapter 11.) The brief ends with this sentence: “Today, there is no race-neutral alternative that will fulfill the military’s and the nation’s compelling need for a diverse officer corps of the highest quality to serve the country.” The brief uses history to show that diversity, and affirmative action, are necessary to a strong military.
More on the topic Example 10.4:
- Example 10.4
- Table of Contents
- Example 15.6
- INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND TRANSNATIONAL EVERYDAY: GENDER RELATIONS AS CHANGES OF STATE
- AnQrganizationrSLegaiFunction
- 14 Gender and the Lost Private Side of International Law