This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Bachelot. A affirmative action. The Supreme Court

in hearing a presentation by two different cases. Students for Farad missions incorporated

versus the President and Fellows of Harvard and the same organization. Students for Farad

missions versus the University of North Carolina. Introduces again the history of affirmative

action and before that we reach back to the Civil War period because it begins with the

14th Amendment I learned from Professor Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institution. He teaches

law at the University of Chicago and NYU writing and defining ideas. Richard, the you present

this as an historical momentum reaching back to the 19th century. So before we come to

the prospects of the court, the present court, I want to start in 1868 and the 14th Amendment

because you identify that as critical as making what should say the original error that needed

to be corrected over the next 100 years. The word is protection. What was the error there that

either the lawmakers didn't understand or later was useful to the adversaries of tolerance.

Yeah, well, it's actually a very important question. The government in this world does two things.

One is what it does is it takes things from you and the other thing that it does is it gives

things to you and the question is what does the protection clause cover and any answer seems to

have been historically that they were worried about the enforcement of the criminal law and they

wanted to deal with questions of differential enforcement. They wanted to make it clear that if

you were a black person, you could not be subject to most of your sanctions and that if you were a

white person, you could not get off. So essentially, whether you were plaintive or defendant, they wanted to

make this thing race neutral. To this very day, there is nobody I think who seriously opposes that

particular notion and says that when it comes to burglary charges, we give heaven punishment to

blacks or to white. But the other thing that the government does is it gives things away. In 1868, it was

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