The latest battle over affirmative action will be fought Oct. 10 at the United States Supreme Court when justices hear arguments in a case that will determine the extent race can be used in undergraduate college admissions.

One of the leading scholars on race and the law, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, will discuss the historical and current understandings of colorblindness and the role of affirmative action when he speaks at the College of Law at 12:40 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4 in room 235 of the Boyd Law Building.

At issue in the Supreme Court case is a University of Texas policy that allows the university to consider race in the admission of students who did not finish in the top 10 percent of their high school class. State law in Texas requires all state universities to automatically admit applicants from the top 10 percent, but university policy allows the use of race to manage admissions from students who fail to meet that benchmark.

A white student from outside the top 10 percent of her class and who was denied admission is suing UT, arguing admissions should be colorblind.

It’s the nature of the concept of colorblindness that Kennedy will address when he delivers the law school’s James Fraser Smith Lecture, "Colorblind Constitutionalism: Attractions and Perils." Kennedy looks at the idea of constitutional colorblindness as it relates to the controversy over affirmative action in general, going beyond the Texas case. He will chart the history of the idea of colorblindness, note its attractions, and explain its weaknesses, concluding that as an aspiration and strategy, colorblindness is misconceived. Any form of colorblind race consciousness that rejects race conscious affirmative action, he believes, is mistaken.

Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of the books Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and Race, Crime, and the Law.

Admission is free and open to the public.