Miranda Massie | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Miranda Kimball Scott Massie December 20, 1966 |
| Education | Cornell University, Yale University, New York University |
| Occupation | Director of the Climate Museum |
Miranda Massie is an American lawyer who is the founder and director of the Climate Museum, the first museum in the US dedicated to climate change.
Massie was born in New York City in 1966. She grew up first in Brooklyn Heights, [1] then in New York’s Hudson River Valley. [2] Massie earned a French Baccalaureat and attended Cornell University, where she studied US History and won several honors upon her graduation in 1989. She enrolled in a Ph.D. program in History at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which she left in 1991 with a master's degree. She then lived in Mexico City before pursuing a J.D. degree at New York University School of Law.[ citation needed ]
Massie moved to Detroit, Michigan to work as a civil rights impact litigator. Her lead counsel roles included the representation of the student intervenors in the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger, [3] [4] which resulted in a 2003 Supreme Court decision. [5] Massie moved back to New York City in 2007 to serve as a senior attorney in the environmental justice unit at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), focusing on children's exposure to toxins in public schools. [6] She became Legal Director at NYLPI, overseeing the firm's work in the areas of environmental, health, and disability equity and also served a period as NYLPI's Interim Executive Director.[ citation needed ]
Increasingly concerned about climate change, [7] [8] in 2014, Massie left her career as a lawyer to found the Climate Museum, where she is the director, and has overseen the presentation of several exhibitions and special programs. [9] [10] She is a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Communications, [11] [ better source needed ] and speaks frequently on climate and culture. [12] [13] [14] [15] Massie’s civil rights impact advocacy and her cultural work on climate have been featured in a variety of print, radio, and television news outlets. [16] [17]
Affirmative action, also known as positive action or positive discrimination, involves sets of policies and practices within a government or organization seeking to include particular groups that were historically discriminated against in areas in which such groups are underrepresented, mistreated or suffer from lack of public support — such as education and employment. Historically and internationally, support for affirmative action has sought to achieve goals such as bridging inequalities in employment and pay, increasing access to education, promoting diversity, and redressing wrongs, harms, or hindrances.
Carol Lani Guinier was an American educator, legal scholar, and civil rights theorist. She was the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship there. Before coming to Harvard in 1998, Guinier taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for ten years. Her scholarship covered the professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, college admissions, and affirmative action. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Guinier to be United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, but withdrew the nomination.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), was a landmark case of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning affirmative action in student admissions. The Court held that a student admissions process that favors "underrepresented minority groups" did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause so long as it took into account other factors evaluated on an individual basis for every applicant. The decision largely upheld the Court's decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which allowed race to be a consideration in admissions policy but held racial quotas to be unconstitutional. In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), a separate case decided on the same day as Grutter, the Court struck down a points-based admissions system that awarded an automatic bonus to the admissions scores of minority applicants.
Lee Carroll Bollinger is an American lawyer and educator who served as the 19th president of Columbia University from 2002 to 2023 and as president of the University of Michigan from 1996 to 2002. He is currently the Seth Low Professor of the University and a faculty member of Columbia Law School. He is a noted legal scholar of the First Amendment and freedom of speech. While serving as President of the University of Michigan, he was at the center of two notable United States Supreme Court cases regarding the use of affirmative action in admissions processes. He also served as chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York board of directors for 2011, and was a member of the board from 2006 to 2012.
Maureen E. Mahoney is a former deputy solicitor general and an appellate lawyer at the law firm of Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C., who has argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Notably, she argued on behalf of the University of Michigan and its affirmative action program in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), in which the Court decided in favor of Michigan by a 5–4 vote.
The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), or Proposal 2, was a ballot initiative in the U.S. state of Michigan that passed into Michigan Constitutional law by a 58% to 42% margin on November 7, 2006, according to results officially certified by the Michigan Secretary of State. By Michigan law, the Proposal became law on December 22, 2006. MCRI was a citizen initiative aimed at banning consideration of race, color, sex, or religion in admission to colleges, jobs, and other publicly funded institutions – effectively prohibiting some affirmative action by public institutions based on those factors. The Proposal's constitutionality was challenged in federal court, but its constitutionality was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary, commonly shortened to By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), is a militant, American far-left group that participates in protests and litigation to achieve its aims. It is a front organization for the Revolutionary Workers League.
Affirmative action in the United States consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to historically excluded groups, specifically racial minorities or women. The programs tended to focus on access to education and employment. The impetus toward affirmative action was redressing the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Further impetus is a desire to ensure public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
Carl Cohen was an American philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the Residential College of the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Eva Jefferson Paterson is the president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, a national legal organization focused on civil rights and anti-discrimination.
Fisher v. University of Texas, 570 U.S. 297 (2013), also known as Fisher I, is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court voided the lower appellate court's ruling in favor of the university and remanded the case, holding that the lower court had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny, articulated in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), to its admissions program. The Court's ruling in Fisher took Grutter and Bakke as given and did not directly revisit the constitutionality of using race as a factor in college admissions.
Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U.S. 291 (2014), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning affirmative action and race- and sex-based discrimination in public university admissions. In a 6-2 decision, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause does not prevent states from enacting bans on affirmative action in education.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court held that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.
The Climate Museum is a nonprofit organization in New York City and the first museum dedicated to climate change and climate solutions in the United States. Its mission is "to inspire action on the climate crisis with programming across the arts and sciences that deepens understanding, builds connections, and advances just solutions." The Climate Museum presents free exhibitions, art installations, youth programs and other public programs at pop-up locations in New York City, its seasonal at its seasonal exhibition hub on Governors Island, in public spaces citywide, and through virtual events.
Fisher v. University of Texas, 579 U.S. 365 (2016) is a United States Supreme Court case which held that the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit correctly found that the University of Texas at Austin's undergraduate admissions policy survived strict scrutiny, in accordance with Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), which ruled that strict scrutiny should be applied to determine the constitutionality of the University's race-conscious admissions policy.
Sherrilyn Ifill is an American lawyer and the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. She is a law professor and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was the Legal Defense Fund's seventh president since Thurgood Marshall founded the organization in 1940. Ifill is a nationally recognized expert on voting rights and judicial selection. In 2021, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual Time 100 list.
Affirmative action refers to activities or policies that seek to help groups that are often affected by discrimination obtain equal access to opportunities, particularly in areas such as employment and education. In the United States, in the early 2000s, the use of race, gender, and other factors in college and university admissions decisions came under attack.
Monika Grütters is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2013-2021. She has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2005 and was chairwoman of the Committee on Culture and Media Affairs from 2009 to 2013. Since December 2016, Grütters has also been the chairwoman of the CDU Berlin and an elected member of the CDU Federal Executive Board.
Lia Beth Epperson is an American civil rights lawyer and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law. She previously served as the senior associate dean for faculty and academic affairs at the law school. Epperson served as director for education litigation and policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 2001 to 2005. Her scholarship focuses primarily on federal courts and educational policies with regard to race. Epperson was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an Institute of Advanced Studies Fellow at Collegium de Lyon. Epperson has authored multiple amicus briefs for the Supreme Court of the United States related to affirmative action and education law.
Patricia Gurin is a social psychologist known for her work documenting the benefits of student and faculty diversity in higher education. She is the Nancy Cantor Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women's Studies at The University of Michigan.