Purpose of Affirmative Action

After reading Volokh's Conspiracy and Professor Sander's entries, I wonder -- what does he and others think is the purpose of affirmative action? It seems as if Professor Sander is measuring the success of a legal career by whether you can get a firm job or pass the bar on your first try. It's odd how he emphasizes these easily qualititative markers of legal success as measures of how successful you are as a lawyer. Yet he does not and easily cannot measure the intangible benefits a black student may have in being surrounded by great faculty, intelligent/enthuisastic classmates, etc. and the benefits all students obtain from having various perspectives in the classroom. He also fails to address the social good that attorneys who may have "less successful" jobs such as being a DA or PD provide for our communities.

I do think that affirmative action can be improved. Perhaps having academic help in conjunction with affirmative action admissions. Additionally, I feel Professor Sander fails to address the reason why we even have affirmative action to begin with -- b/c of the current systematic racial discrimination and oppression that certain racial minorities face. What can be done to address this problem if the current implementation of affirmative action is not working? Are we putting disadvantaged racial minorities in a canoe without a paddle and asking them to race others better equipped than they are? Professor Sander instead frames the issue as how to get blacks in law firms and passing the bar on their first time based on what law schools they attend. In framing the issue like this, Professor Sander perpetuates the pervasive and destructive stereotype of Blacks being inferior to whites. Since expectations imposed on humans often correlate to their performance and success, this stereotype of inferiority may result in worse performance results from Black students. I think Professor Sander's article framework does injustice to the purposes of affirmative action.