mr. bursch. >> thank you, mr.ef justice, and may it please the court, the issue in this case is whether a michigan constitutional provision requiring equal treatment violates equal protection. and for two reasons, the answer is no. first, unlike the laws at issue in hunter and seattle, section 26 does not repeal an antidiscrimination law. instead, it repeals preferences and thus, it's an impediment to preferential treatment, not equal treatment. >> holt had nothing to do with an antidiscrimination law. it had to do with a remedy, defective segregation. why isn't this identical to seattle? >> justice sotomayor, it's not identical because of the remedy issue. in seattle, they were trying to create, in the court's words, equal educational opportunity by imposing a remedy that would result in equality in the schools. >> you don't think that the proponents of affirmative action are attempting to do the same thing? one of the bill sponsors here said that this constitutional amendment will bring back desegregation in mic

mr. bursch, you have 4 minutes remaining. >> thank you, mr. chief justice. i'm going to start with a sentence from crawford, decided the same day as seattle, where this court defined what a racial classification is -- a racial classification either says or implies that persons are to be treated differently on account of race." it doesn't say anything about laws with or without a racial focus. and we think that is the test that ultimately should come out of the decision in this case. now, my friends on the other side disagree with that, because if that's the test section 26 is constitutional. and so they draw this false dichotomy between laws that involve race and laws that don't involve race. we will put them in two separate chambers of the legislature and charge a fee if you want to talk about -- about race. and we know that can't be right, because of, chief justice roberts, your observation that the whole point of equal protection is to take race off the table when everyone is being treated the same. that's why they can't -- >> you quoted -- you quoted fro

mr. bursch, can i ask you to go back to the very first thing you said, because i didn't get your -- your point. the question -- what impact has the termination of affirmative action had on michigan, on the enrollment of minorities in the university of michigan? do we have any clear picture of that, what effect the repeal of affirmative action has had? >> yes, justice ginsburg, we have a muddy picture. as we explain in our reply brief, the first thing that we have is the actual statistics for the first full year after section 26 went into effect. this is 2008. and what we find is that the number of underrepresented minorities as part of the entering freshman class at michigan as a percentage changed very little. it went from about 10-3/4 percent to about 10-1/4 percent. then it gets very difficult to track, because, following the u.s.census's lead, in 2010 the university of michigan stopped requiring students to check only a single box to demonstrate what their race or ethnicity was and moved to a multiple checkbox system. and justice sotomayor, when you see in the amici briefs that there

mr. bursch, you have 4 minutes remaining. >> thank you, mr. chief justice. i'm going to start with a sentence from crawford, decided the same day as seattle, where this court defined what a racial classification is -- a racial classification either says or implies that persons are to be treated differently on account of race." it doesn't say anything about laws with or without a racial focus. and we think that is the test that ultimately should come out of the decision in this case. now, my friends on the other side disagree with that, because if that's the test section 26 is constitutional. and so they draw this false dichotomy between laws that involve race and laws that don't involve race; we will put them in two separate chambers of the legislature and charge a fee if you want to talk about -- about race. and we know that can't be right, because of, chief justice roberts, your observation that the whole point of equal protection is to take race off the table when everyone is being treated the same. that's why they can't -- >> you quoted -- you quoted fro