Landmark SCOTUS Ruling On Affirmative Action

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Let the calls to “reform” the Court begin once again in 3, 2, 1 . . . 

[KansasTiger 3,254]

1 minute ago, NolaAuTiger said:

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Let the calls to “reform” the Court begin once again in 3, 2, 1 . . . 

My understanding was this was just in higher education.

So...Yay? My kids can now get indoctrinated by our universities easier! And they are actually a minority. Just the one minority that is also discriminated against by affirmative action.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

9 minutes ago, KansasTiger said:

My understanding was this was just in higher education.

So...Yay? My kids can now get indoctrinated by our universities easier! And they are actually a minority. Just the one minority that is also discriminated against by affirmative action.

I’m still reading through the opinion. The damned thing is almost 250 pages.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

[SaltyTiger 7,853]

35 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

I’m still reading through the opinion. The damned thing is almost 250 pages.

I read the Daily Wire article. When you and Tex finish the opinion fill us in please. I haven’t done 250 pages since The Pelican Brief in 1994.

[AU9377 5,024]

I actually agree with this opinion.  There was a time when affirmative action in education was necessary.  I still have no problem with schools, like Auburn, finding ways to increase minority enrollment in an effort to meet the challenge of educating and meeting it's mission.  However, schools should make opportunities more economics based and less race based.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

4 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

I actually agree with this opinion.  There was a time when affirmative action in education was necessary.  I still have no problem with schools, like Auburn, finding ways to increase minority enrollment in an effort to meet the challenge of educating and meeting it's mission.  However, schools should make opportunities more economics based and less race based.

Interested about your thoughts on NG's concurrence, as well as the dissents -- If you have combed through them yet. 

[AU9377 5,024]

13 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

Interested about your thoughts on NG's concurrence, as well as the dissents -- If you have combed through them yet. 

I don't always agree with NG's approach in applying his form of strict construction to every constitutional issue and issues applying Federal statutes.  However, he makes a compelling point on this issue.  In the scope of our history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a modern document.  As such, the wording of that document speaks for itself. 

I'm squeezed for time right now, but will add to this when I can.  What are your thoughts?

[SaltyTiger 7,853]

8 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

I'm squeezed for time right now, but will add to this when I can.

Always curious as to what clients are getting jilted when two lawyers are spending billable time on this forum….just a thought 93.

[TexasTiger 13,000]

14 minutes ago, SaltyTiger said:

Always curious as to what clients are getting jilted when two lawyers are spending billable time on this forum….just a thought 93.

He ain’t billing his lunch hour unless he’s with client. Nola, however, I dunno…😉

[AU9377 5,024]

19 minutes ago, SaltyTiger said:

Always curious as to what clients are getting jilted when two lawyers are spending billable time on this forum….just a thought 93.

I worked in a firm years ago that did a lot of work representing commercial insurers and surety issues.  I traveled to Raleigh, NC with the partner that I worked under to sit in on depositions for a few days.  The first day two corporate reps and an insurance rep took us to grab a sandwich at Mike's Subs for lunch.  It was fall 2004 and Auburn was having a great football season. There was a Sports Illustrated or something on the table and the insurance rep started a conversation about football. 

When we left Mike's Subs, the partner I worked for was, in his own words, "flabbergasted"  that I could do something so careless as talk football for a half hour while eating my sandwich.  The fact that I laughed when he mentioned it probably made it worse in his mind.  After all, had we talked about the case, we could have billed a few hundred bucks for that time.  He wasn't a bad guy to work for, but that was and is a sickness. 

My financial portfolio would look a heck of a lot better today had I adopted that type of attitude, but I'm just not wired that way for some reason.

[TexasTiger 13,000]

4 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

I worked in a firm years ago that did a lot of work representing commercial insurers and surety issues.  I traveled to Raleigh, NC with the partner that I worked under to sit in on depositions for a few days.  The first day two corporate reps and an insurance rep took us to grab a sandwich at Mike's Subs for lunch.  It was fall 2004 and Auburn was having a great football season. There was a Sports Illustrated or something on the table and the insurance rep started a conversation about football. 

When we left Mike's Subs, the partner I worked for was, in his own words, "flabbergasted"  that I could do something so careless as talk football for a half hour while eating my sandwich.  The fact that I laughed when he mentioned it probably made it worse in his mind.  After all, had we talked about the case, we could have billed a few hundred bucks for that time.  He wasn't a bad guy to work for, but that was and is a sickness. 

My financial portfolio would look a heck of a lot better today had I adopted that type of attitude, but I'm just not wired that way for some reason.

Your approach is better for client retention and referrals.

[LPTiger 5,173]

9 hours ago, AU9377 said:

I actually agree with this opinion.  There was a time when affirmative action in education was necessary.  I still have no problem with schools, like Auburn, finding ways to increase minority enrollment in an effort to meet the challenge of educating and meeting it's mission.  However, schools should make opportunities more economics based and less race based.

Dad gum AU9377 throwing us a nasty slider... It is amazing how much common ground we can all find as Americans if we can all agree to sit down and talk to one another as brothers. We all descended from the same 2 humans.   99% of us love this country, love each other and feel it is the best country in the world.   God's second commandment is love thy neighbor.   Somewhere we have lost this!!!! 

[LPTiger 5,173]

8 hours ago, AU9377 said:

I worked in a firm years ago that did a lot of work representing commercial insurers and surety issues.  I traveled to Raleigh, NC with the partner that I worked under to sit in on depositions for a few days.  The first day two corporate reps and an insurance rep took us to grab a sandwich at Mike's Subs for lunch.  It was fall 2004 and Auburn was having a great football season. There was a Sports Illustrated or something on the table and the insurance rep started a conversation about football. 

When we left Mike's Subs, the partner I worked for was, in his own words, "flabbergasted"  that I could do something so careless as talk football for a half hour while eating my sandwich.  The fact that I laughed when he mentioned it probably made it worse in his mind.  After all, had we talked about the case, we could have billed a few hundred bucks for that time.  He wasn't a bad guy to work for, but that was and is a sickness. 

My financial portfolio would look a heck of a lot better today had I adopted that type of attitude, but I'm just not wired that way for some reason.

Wait a minute AU9377, you are a corporate defense lawyer???

[AU9377 5,024]

24 minutes ago, LPTiger said:

Wait a minute AU9377, you are a corporate defense lawyer???

Not currently, but I have been in the past.  I'm not sure I would characterize it as corporate defense as much as I would civil litigation, with around 6 years specializing in litigation involving  large projects with a surety involved.  I was also corporate counsel for a franchising group for several years.  When cell phones were first becoming common, I was getting a start as a public defender. I trust most of those clients as much or more than the corporate clients I had years later. LOL

[AURex 2,030]

Auburn Black enrollment is about 5%. Yet we are supposed to be the state institution -- the university that serves *all* of Alabama's constituencies, including minorities. But now we are supposed to ignore race.  So yeah, let's go. 99.9999% white. As for trying to give a boost to kids who do really well from marginalized high schools -- well, ya know, FU and goodbye.

[DKW 86 7,440]

2 hours ago, AURex said:

Auburn Black enrollment is about 5%. Yet we are supposed to be the state institution -- the university that serves *all* of Alabama's constituencies, including minorities. But now we are supposed to ignore race.  So yeah, let's go. 99.9999% white. As for trying to give a boost to kids who do really well from marginalized high schools -- well, ya know, FU and goodbye.

It is time the DOE finally did its job and fixed those schools, all schools.

AU has to get its minority enrollment up.

[AU9377 5,024]

10 hours ago, AURex said:

Auburn Black enrollment is about 5%. Yet we are supposed to be the state institution -- the university that serves *all* of Alabama's constituencies, including minorities. But now we are supposed to ignore race.  So yeah, let's go. 99.9999% white. As for trying to give a boost to kids who do really well from marginalized high schools -- well, ya know, FU and goodbye.

To be fair, Auburn has been trying for decades to increase minority enrollment.  Even with this ruling, Auburn can consider factors like economic background, where someone lives or graduated from high school and other factors.  There is scholarship money that goes unused every year that is earmarked specifically for minority enrollment. One challenge that has, at times, kept Auburn from attracting some of the most qualified minority candidates is the proximity of Tuskegee University to the Auburn campus.  A friend of mine's son could have attended Auburn and had his entire tuition covered by scholarship money, but he chose to go to Tuskegee instead on a partial scholarship.  I'm not certain how to overcome that. 

I do agree that Auburn needs to keep doing everything possible to attract more minority students and serve the entire state.

[Cardin Drake 1,853]

University of Texas has an interesting approach that I actually like.  If you graduate in the top 6% or so (the number changes) of your high school, you are an auto admit.  That takes up about 75% of the admission slots overall.  Lots of kids and parents at the more competitive high schools hate it because it is so hard to get into the top 6%.  Then lots of kids from the less competitive high schools wind up flunking out, but they get a shot.  I think it's a reasonable way to do it.  Admission to the school does not mean you are admitted to the program of your choice, however.

As an aside, I find it interesting that U. Texas is so hard to get into now. It's solely because of demographics.  It's overall rankings have hardly changed in the last 50 years, but the population growth in the state without a corresponding growth in admission slots have made it very difficult to get in.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Cardin Drake

[auburnatl1 5,010]

Where most of rub is in this case is with those trying to get into the elite academic institutions.  There’s a reason they picked Harvard and unc to litigate.  And if youre a4.2 gpa, 1540 sat student it’s an issue. However for the broader portfolio of higher education options  - state universities , community colleges, hcbu’s  ect - the biggest limit is often not the getting  accepted part, it’s the cost. The total cost. Not as sexy to debate as affirmative action (and it opens another Pandora’s box), but if you’re really trying to solve the diversity problem, solve the entire problem.
 

 

[Cardin Drake 1,853]

The elite universities will continue to use the "holistic" approach to applications, which basically lets them admit whoever they want to.  They have already solved the "problem" created by the recent SC decision by not requiring SATs any more and that was what was making them look so bad.  They will continue to primarily admit the rich and connected, then athletes, and then a smattering of whoever will make them look politically correct.  Mostly left out is the middle class kids going to suburban high schools.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Cardin Drake

[TexasTiger 13,000]

1 hour ago, Cardin Drake said:

The elite university will continue to use the "holistic" approach to applications, which basically lets them admit whoever they want to.  They have already solved the "problem" created by the recent SC decision by not requiring SATs any more and that was what was making them look so bad.  They will continue to primarily admit the rich and connected, then athletes, and then a smattering of whoever will make them look politically correct.  Mostly left out is the middle class kids going to suburban high schools.

Not untrue.

[homersapien 11,428]

The time Clarence Thomas said affirmative action was ‘critical’ for society

By Timothy Bella

 

Four decades before he was among the conservative Supreme Court justices who restricted the use of affirmative action in higher education, Clarence Thomas told staffers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that “God only knows where I would be today” if not for the legal principles of equal employment opportunity measures such as affirmative action that are “critical to minorities and women in this society.”

“These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years,” Thomas, then the EEOC chairman, said in 1983.

His comments were later cited in outlets including The Washington Post, the New York Times and Newsweek. A 2022 opinion piece in the National Review argued that Thomas had praised “the proper application of the laws” instead of affirmative action.

But Thomas has mostly criticized affirmative action, laws that consider race in school and the workplace. In 2013, the Supreme Court justice compared affirmative action to Jim Crow-era laws, saying that “educational benefits” were used as justification for both.

“The argument that educational benefits justify racial discrimination was advanced in support of racial segregation in the 1950’s, but emphatically rejected by this Court,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, a 2013 case that called for a higher standard to be met when justifying affirmative action in an educational setting. “And just as the alleged educational benefits of segregation were insufficient to justify racial discrimination then … the alleged educational benefits of diversity cannot justify racial discrimination today.”

He added, “The University’s professed good intentions cannot excuse its outright racial discrimination any more than such intentions justified the now denounced arguments of slaveholders and segregationists.”

Thomas’s many public statements and opinions on affirmative action before and during his time on the Supreme Court have been reexamined after Thursday’s rulings on race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC). Thomas joined the court’s conservative majority in ruling that Harvard and UNC violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. In ruling that “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” the Supreme Court’s decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

After Thomas read his concurring opinion denouncing universities’ use of affirmative action in admissions as “rudderless,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the only other Black justice and one of the court’s most liberal members — described Thomas’s words as part of his “prolonged attack” on affirmative action.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Thomas first gained recognition as a lawyer and assistant to then-Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.) and was described in The Post in 1980 as “a long-time supporter of Ronald Reagan, opposed to the minimum wage law, rent control, busing and affirmative action.” He told The Post that attending college and law school with White classmates who believed he was there only because of his race was the worst experience of his life. When Thomas was accepted to Yale Law School in 1971, Yale’s goal was to have 10 percent of its incoming class be students of color, according to PBS.

“You had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn’t deserve to be there on merit,” Thomas said to The Post in December 1980.

John Bolton, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and a classmate of Thomas’s at Yale, told PBS that he thought Thomas believed that “people assumed he was there as a beneficiary of affirmative action, and it grated on him.”

That feeling followed Thomas into his professional career; he has said that he avoided working on any issue directly related to Black people because of his belief that colleagues thought he had the job only because of his race.

“If I ever went to work for the EEOC or did anything directly connected with Blacks, my career would be irreparably ruined,” he said at the time. Less than two years later, in 1982, Reagan appointed Thomas as the chairman of the EEOC.

Thomas noted in his 1983 speech that while “too much posturing has taken place on issues such as affirmative action,” lingering problems surrounding equal employment opportunity for minorities and women needed to be solved.

“For the most part, they must be solved by applying legal principles of paramount importance to me,” he said. “But for them, God only knows where I would be today.”

After giving his brief praise, he noted his abhorrence for anyone who would “twist, bend or distort” laws such as affirmative action, “whether such distortions are said to help or hurt minorities or women.”

During his time on the Supreme Court, Thomas has repeatedly said in cases that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment bars the consideration of race, including race-based affirmative action. (The amendment says, “Nor shall any State … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”)

In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, the landmark 2003 case on affirmative action in student admissions, Thomas quoted Justice John Harlan’s dissent in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that ushered in the era of Jim Crow: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

Ten years later, Thomas went one step further and compared the affirmative-action policies presented in Fisher to Jim Crow-era segregationists, arguing that the University of Texas’s “racial tinkering” ultimately harmed the people it was designed to help.

“The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities,” he wrote in his concurring opinion. “I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.”

A second version of Fisher returned to the Supreme Court in 2016, as the court reaffirmed that the value of creating a diverse student body allowed university officials to consider race in making admission decisions. In his dissent, Thomas reiterated that the state’s use of race-based admissions is “categorically prohibited” by the Constitution, saying it was a “faddish theory that racial discrimination may produce ‘educational benefits.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/30/clarence-thomas-affirmative-action/

 

Love the ironies. 😉

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

On 6/29/2023 at 12:13 PM, AU9377 said:

I don't always agree with NG's approach in applying his form of strict construction to every constitutional issue and issues applying Federal statutes.  However, he makes a compelling point on this issue.  In the scope of our history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a modern document.  As such, the wording of that document speaks for itself. 

I'm squeezed for time right now, but will add to this when I can.  What are your thoughts?

I will say Justice Jackson’s dissent is alarming. She espouses a dangerous theory of judicial reasoning. It has very little to do, at best, with legal analysis; and all to do with building a self-perceived social consensus. That is not the role of a judge. Granted, I would hope no such theory ever surfaces in a majority opinion. 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

21 hours ago, homersapien said:

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Says the affirmative action-appointee Jackson.

By the way, that entire article is a gross misrepresentation of what Thomas actually said. Go read his speech for yourself.