This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He is the Lawrence Aetish Professor of Law at NYU, and he's also a senior lecturer at the University

of Chicago.

And Richard, I'd like to talk through with you an interesting development to me, at least in an upcoming Supreme Court case on affirmative action.

Now, as you know, challenges to the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are going to be heard by the Supreme Court in a few months

and this week a friend of the court brief was filed by over 60 large companies that includes

Airbnb Apple, General Motors, Google,

Lyft, Starbucks, Walgreens, a lot of companies you know.

And they say that there are benefits to diversity in the workplace,

which is more likely when the future workforce being

trained in American colleges is more diverse.

So I want to know from you, is that enough of a reason to allow race-based preferences in college

admissions?

Well, I think first what you have to do is to understand what the motivation that these particular firms have.

And I think it's actually an interesting and somewhat surprising one.

If you're running a firm, what happens is you are going to start to take people.

And if you have a strict kind of civil rights law in place one way or another,

anytime somebody could be hired, the argument could be that this was based upon some of the legal

characteristic that there was a disproportionate impact and that somebody of the other disappointed

racer group could file in order to upset that. And businesses

...