Liberal Justices Embrace Originalism on Affirmative Action (1)

The Supreme Court’s liberal justices took a page out of the conservative playbook Monday, invoking history and “originalism” in defending the use of race in college admissions.

Embraced by conservatives, originalism is the idea that judges should look to what the law would have meant to those who passed it. Here, that means asking whether the civil-war era 14th Amendment allows universities to consider race when deciding what students to admit to their schools, or whether it demands that administrators take a colorblind approach.

Justice Elena Kagan noted during marathon arguments that there had been very little ...