Through Streets Broad and Narrow: Six “Centrist” Justices on the Paths to Inclusion

Karst discusses the "centrists" Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican presidents from 1969 to 2008. He focuses on the six Justices--Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell Jr, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, and David H. Souter--who have a shared concern for rights to inclusion, to group status equality. Examining the theme of inclusion in the work of six Justices, he considers both its place in accommodating contending interests and its use in achieving various forms of social utility. The accounts show that all six Justices have participated in preserving the validation of one or another version of race-conscious diversity admissions to state universities and schools--that is, preserving moves (or at least gestures) toward integration in the face of repeated assault by the cultural counterrevolutionaries.