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31996. That's Amicus to 31996. Hi and welcome to Amicus Slate's podcast about the U.S.

Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Supreme Court correspondent.

Well, in a little under two weeks, the High Court is going to hear oral arguments in the term's big, big affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas. This case is actually

known as Fisher, too, because it was first argued at the court in 2013. Back then, ruling by a 7-to-1 margin,

the court kicked the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which had erred,

said the High Court, in not applying strict scrutiny. That's the most skeptical form of

constitutional review, to the affirmative action policy at UT Austin.

So now Fisher comes back to the court, presumably because when the Fifth Circuit heard

the case a second time, they still found that UT Austin's admissions policy, which still

allows the university to consider race and ethnicity but in limited ways, was constitutionally

kosher.

This is because we have a long constitutional tradition going back to Brown v. Board of Education

and the affirmative action cases that followed of taking race into some account when attempting to remediate past discrimination.

So this week, with no argument scheduled at the court, we're going to take a closer look at the historical antecedents of Fisher, from Brown v. Board to more recent affirmative action cases and some desegregation cases that have reflected a whole new view of race in the Roberts Court era.

We invited in a historian, Professor Risa Goluboff, who teaches law and history at the University of Virginia, and is the author of The Lost Promise of Civil Rights and her new book, Vagrant Nation, will be coming out in February from Oxford University Press.

Risa's here to help us understand, I hope, how we got from Brown v. Board to Fisher in just over half a century.

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