Lino Graglia

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Lino A. Graglia is the Dalton Cross Professor of Law at the University of Texas specializing in antitrust litigation. He obtained a BA from the City College of New York in 1952, and an LLB from Columbia University in 1954. He worked in the United States Department of Justice during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. Graglia is an outspoken Catholic conservative of Sicilian background. He is a well known critic of affirmative action and racial quotas.

Graglia is a critic of some aspects of judicial review, believing that the courts are an illegitimate avenue for securing social change. He accuses modern liberals of making an end-run around democracy by seeking political victories in front of judges instead of at the ballot box.

Graglia was considered for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan, but was withdrawn due to controversy over articles Graglia had written about school busing as well as remarks Graglia made which were alleged to be racially insensitive.

Graglia became controversial when he made a speech on UT campus in 1997 in which he said that "blacks and Mexican-Americans can't compete academically with whites."^[1] The comment was widely reported and generated discussions across the country. While many newspapers including the Houston Chronicle as well as Texas NAACP officials labelled the comment insensitive, the remark's context can be construed to indicate what Graglia defender David Horowitz calls an "uncomfortable truth" about the failure of affirmative action. Horowitz cites as prophetic a different portion of the same speech that landed Graglia in the public crosshairs:

"Racial preferences are the root cause of virtually all the major problems plaguing American campuses today. They result in a student body with two groups, identifiable by race, essentially in different academic ballparks. An inability to compete successfully in the game being played necessarily results in demands that the game be changed, and thus are born demands for black and Hispanic studies and 'multiculturalism.' Little is more humiliating to the racially preferred than open discussion of the conditions of their admission. Concealment and deception are therefore always essential elements of racial preference programs -- and thus is born insistence on political correctness and the need [to suppress] 'hate speech.'"^[2]

In an article titled The Affirmative Action Fraud, published in 1999 in the Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, Graglia cited The Bell Curve, a book by professor Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray, to assert the following:

Blacks are not in fact 'underrepresented,' but rather 'overrepresented'—that is, their numbers are disproportionately high—in institutions of higher education once IQ scores are taken into account. PDF of article

Graglia's wife, F. Carolyn Graglia, is an author who has written a book critical of feminism entitled Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism.

[edit] Writings

Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court's Decision on Race and the Schools, 1976, ISBN 0-8014-0980-2
The Supreme Court's Busing Decisions: A Study in Government by the Judiciary
Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Demise of Popular Government
A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values