Law Prof Sees Constitutional Problem With Schools’ Legacy Preferences

A law review article argues that the Constitution’s nobility clauses bar public universities from granting admissions preferences to the children of alumni.

Carlton F.W. Larson, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, argues that public schools should not be granting preferences based solely on ancestry, Adam Liptak writes in his Sidebar column for the New York Times. Larson’s article in the Washington University Law Review says the preferences cannot stand under the nobility clauses, which bar the federal government and the states from granting titles of nobility.

Such preferences help spur alumni to give contributions to their schools, but some have charged they favor white students.

A federal judge in Durham, N.C., wrote the only decision directly addressing the constitutionality of legacy preferences. The 1976 opinion permitted the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to continue granting them.