Edward Jay Blum is a conservative legal strategist known for his activism against affirmative action based on race and ethnicity. He connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in "test cases" which he tries to use to set legal precedents. He is the director and sole member of the Project on Fair Representation, which he founded in 2005. According to its website, the Project focuses specifically on voting, education, contracting, employment, racial quotas, and racial reparations. Since the 1990s, Blum has been heavily involved in bringing six cases to the United States Supreme Court. He is a key figure in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Early life Blum was born into a Jewish family in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where his parents owned and operated the local shoe store. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973. He then studied West African writers for a year at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He describes his parents as generally left-wing liberals who supported Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and that he was, eventually, "the first Republican my mother ever met". Political interest While working as a stock broker in Houston, Texas in the early 80s, he became involved in the neoconservatism movement. In 1990, he realized that the Democratic incumbent in his congressional district, Craig Anthony Washington, was running unopposed, so decided to run against him for the Republican Party. During that campaign, Blum and his wife Lark went door-knocking and realized that the boundaries of their district erratically divided streets based on ethnicity, with the suspected purpose to gerrymander a majority African-American district in order to grant increased voting power to minorities. Blum eventually lost the congressional race. But he and others filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the racially gerrymandered districts violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case, Bush v. Vera, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Blum's favor. Activism Blum holds a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). His areas of research at AEI include civil rights policy, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and redistricting. He has also written the book, The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (2007). His litigation includes United States Supreme Court cases Bush v. Vera (1996), Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1