SCOTUScast 6-29-07 featuring Gail Heriot
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County
On June 28, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County cases. The Court was asked to consider the school districts' use of race in assigning students to schools. In this episode of SCOTUScast, Professor Gail Heriot of the University of San Diego School of Law offers her thoughts on the recent decision.
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Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law (Retired)
Gail Heriot is a recently retired law professor from the University of San Diego. She also served as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2007 to 2025. She is also the chairman of the board of the American Civil Rights Project and the chair emerita of the Civil Rights practice group at the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy.
Professor Heriot is a prolific writer in the area of civil rights. She is the author of many law review articles. She is also the editor (along with Maimon Schwarzschild) of the 2021 anthology, A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. Her upcoming book is entitled, Why We Walk on Eggshell: How Our Civil Rights Laws Helped Bring About the Woke Era—And the Trump Era, Too.
Her writings for a general audience have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the National Review and many other newspapers and magazines.
In 1996, she co-chaired the successful “Yes on Proposition 209” campaign, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit state-sponsored discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. In 2020, she co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign, which successfully prevented Proposition 209’s repeal.