What are the judicial standards for evaluating affirmative action?
The U.S. Supreme Court has documented a set of procedural standards for evaluating the constitutionality of affirmative action policies (Nacoste, 1995). • The procedural weighing standard allows race to be used as a factor, but not the only or major factor, in the design of affirmative action programs. Bakke v. University of California (1978). • The procedural effect standard states that affirmative action procedures within an organization must be appropriate to a documented level of discrimination in the targeted segment of the organization. City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson (1989); Aderand v. Pea (1995). Several Supreme Court cases have set out the conditions under which affirmative action programs have been judged to be inconsistent with these two standards and, therefore, unconstitutional. Studies show that resistance to affirmative action policies and feelings of stigmatization among its recipients are the direct result of the way employers implement these types of procedural pract
