Not Worth The Fuss

THOUGH NO FOE of affirmative action, I find it odd that, in their effort to overcome one societal flaw, the majority overlooks another.

Any call for affirmative action should be grounded at some level in the desire for justice. Minorities, systematically oppressed, deserve some sort of special consideration. Fine. The end, though, is still justice and not simply more minorities in any particular institution.

And Harvard Law School has very little to do with justice. Most graduates of that institution--and especially the high-powered and much sought-after graduates of the Law Review--spend their lives handling the business of systematically and legally oppressing other Americans in the name of the greater corporate good. Helping Hooker Chemical explain away Love Canal or Ford disguise the problems with its Pinto is sorry work, no better if done by a Black man or a woman than by a prep-school WASP.

If the editors of the Law Review were really concerned about social justice--not, as some cynics have suggested, about their own resumes--they might do well to turn Gannett House into an arm of the school's underfunded legal aid clinic. In the case of the law review, affirmative action would only be window dressing.