He earned a BA from the City College of New York in 1952, and an LLB from Columbia University in 1954, before working in the Eisenhower administration's United States Department of Justice.
Graglia made a speech on UT campus in 1997 in which he said that "blacks and Mexican-Americans can't compete academically with whites.
"[5] The speech was at a meeting of the Students for Equal Opportunity on the topic of the Hopwood v. Texas case, which ended affirmative action for UT Law applicants who were members of a designated "minority" group [6] (in 2003 the Supreme Court abrogated Hopwood in Grutter v. Bollinger).
In an article titled The Affirmative Action Fraud, published in 1999 in the Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, Graglia cited The Bell Curve, a book by professor Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray, to assert the following: Blacks are not in fact 'underrepresented,' but rather 'overrepresented'—that is, their numbers are disproportionately high—in institutions of higher education once IQ scores are taken into account.
[7]In 2009 Graglia was a speaker at a conference organized by white separatist Michael H. Hart on the claimed need to defend "America's Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity.