BY LAURA E. GÓMEZ

This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an affirmative action case in the educational context for the first time since the landmark University of California vs. Bakke case took place 25 years ago. The justices will decide whether or not the University of Michigan’s law school admissions policy that gives a boost to applicants who are African American, Hispanic or Native American falls within those race-conscious programs deemed constitutional in Bakke.

In the past decade, a total of four federal circuit courts have ruled in this area, so the Supreme Court has taken the case to resolve a split among them. The Fifth and Eleventh circuits have found affirmative action programs at the University of Texas and the University of Georgia to be unconstitutional, while the Ninth and Sixth circuits, relying on Bakke, have validated race-conscious admissions programs at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan.

The political geography is jarring: As it stands today, federal courts prohibit public universities in the South from using racial preferences to achieve diverse student bodies, but federal courts elsewhere in the United States allow such preferences. And, as it often is, California is ever the exception, since a voter-initiated amendment to the state constitution banned affirmative action in public educational and employment contexts in 1997.

What lessons can be learned from the experience of post-affirmative action California? The white plaintiffs in the Michigan cases and conservative pundits point to California as a success story; if California’s public universities can achieve diversity without affirmative action, all universities can do so.

Well, from where I sit as a professor at the only public law school in increasingly diverse Southern California, things do not look so rosy. I’ve had to teach too many civil rights and criminal law classes without a single African-American student and with only a handful of Chicano and other Latino students. Consider that in UCLA law school’s Class of 2002 there were only two African Americans out of 300 students. Ten years earlier — the year of the L.A. riots following the acquittal of four police officers videotaped brutally beating Rodney King — UCLA graduated 22 African-American students (8% of the class).

Post-affirmative action admissions policies in California, Texas and Florida that automatically admit a certain percentage (4%, 10% and 20%, respectively) of top students at each high school to the freshman class at state universities do not impact professional schools one iota.

It is these law, medical and business schools that produce public and private sector leaders at both the state and national level. In the decade before affirmative action was banned, UCLA’s and Berkeley’s law schools changed the complexion of the California Bar, literally, by graduating almost 600 African-American students and more than 900 Latino students. Studies show that minority lawyers and doctors serve members of their racial groups at rates significantly higher than professionals outside their racial group.

But in California, as the non-white population grows and develops a greater need for legal services, public law schools are actually producing fewer lawyers to serve these communities. The implications are frightening.

Gómez is professor of law and sociology.