GETTIN' SQUIGGLY WITH IT: David Frum sums up the Supreme Court's non-decision decision on affirmative action perfectly:

Suppose you were a moderately conscientious university administrator trying to figure out what is OK and what is not. You are just as confused today as you were the day before yesterday. Preferential treatment for certain racial groups is constitutionally permissible and maybe even mandatory – but explicit quotas are forbidden (that’s the holding of the Bakke case back in the 1970s) and so are numerical bonuses of the sort that Michigan used. How are you supposed to run an admissions system on the basis of that information?

Once upon a time, we expected the Supreme Court to hand down broad principles of law that people could use to guide their behavior. But in recent years, the current court has taken to issuing ever-more specific decisions with ever-narrower application. Four years ago, my one-time professor Cass Sunstein wrote a whole book praising what he called “judicial minimalism.” His hero was Sandra Day O’Connor, whose whole jurisprudence boils down to a series of snap, arbitrary judgments: “This gerrymander is too squiggly: No.” “This one is not too squiggly: Yes.”

Sandra Day O’Connor is by all accounts a perfectly lovely person. People who have worked with her tell me that she is a very smart lawyer. But these cases in which she was the decisive vote exemplify her failure to do the job that people pay judges, and especially Supreme Court judges, to do. Courts are supposed to settle disputes. O’Connor decisions, by contrast, tend to provoke endless rounds of further litigation, as redistricters try to guess how squiggly a district can be before it becomes too squiggly and universities attempt to anticpate how much racial preference is too much. This isn’t law: It’s a high-stakes version of the children’s guessing game, “Getting warmer; getting colder.”