Affirmative action is about the economic bottom line, not just racial diversity

As the president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Michelle Asha Cooper has worked to give low-income, minority and other underrepresented groups a pathway to a college degree. Inclusion is a key part of the nonprofit’s mission, just as it is central to Thursday’s historic Supreme Court ruling to uphold race-conscious college admissions. But the decision is about much more than that, Cooper says.

Read the full Washington Post story here.

Will Supreme Court end affirmative action in college admissions?

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected soon to issue a ruling on affirmative action in college admissions, in a case called Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Plaintiff Abigail Fisher, a white woman denied admission to UT, is challenging the constitutionality of UT’s consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in assembling an undergraduate class. A ruling could come as early as Thursday morning.

Read the story here.

U.S. Supreme Court will mull requirements for attorneys' fees under Title VII

By Robert Iafolla, Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should pay $4.7 million in attorneys' fees to lawyers who successfully defended a trucking company against the agency's putative sex discrimination class action.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• “We Don’t Want To Pay $4.7 Million” - EEOC Files Its Supreme Court Brief in CRST Fee Sanction Case (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)
• Briefing For The Big Bucks: CRST Asks U.S. Supreme Court For Attorneys’ Fees From The EEOC (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)
• Supreme Court to review CRST attorneys’ fee award against EEOC (Constangy Brooks Smith & Prophete LLP)
• Title VII—Award of Attorney’s Fees to Prevailing Defendant (Mayer Brown LLP)
• U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on attorneys’ fees in Title VII cases (Squire Patton Boggs)

Obama Administration Says Schools May Use Race for Diversity

Bloomberg Business Week
December 02, 2011, 4:19 PM EST

By Greg Stohr


(Updates with comment from guidance in third paragraph.)

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration told school districts and universities they may consider the race of students in programs to foster diversity, revoking Bush administration guidelines that had advocated race-neutral enrollment policies.

The U.S. Justice Department and Education Department laid out approaches schools can use to promote racial diversity in documents released today. The policy represents the administration’s interpretation of three recent Supreme Court decisions that have limited the use of race, without outlawing it altogether.

Full Story: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-02/obama-administration-says-schools-may-use-race-for-diversity.html

Affirmative-Action Critics See Texas Case as a Vehicle for a Supreme Court Victory

The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Peter Schmidt
Washington
October 31, 2011

Leading critics of affirmative action say they are optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin and hand down a ruling that curtails, or even ends, the use of such admissions preferences by colleges around the nation.
In briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the lawyers for two white students rejected by the university have been joined by several...

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Affirmative-Action-Critics-See/129594/ (Subscription Required)

An Update on the Fisher v. University of Texas Affirmative Action Case, and the Procedural Issue That Might, But That Need Not, Complicate Things

Verdict
October 28, 2011
Vikram David Amar

Last month, I wrote a column for this site analyzing an important affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas. The plaintiffs in that case—unsuccessful undergraduate applicants to the University of Texas who challenge the constitutionality of UT’s race-based affirmative action admissions program—are currently seeking review in the U.S. Supreme Court. (Interested readers should consult my prior column for detailed background on the substantive issues raised by the lawsuit.)
Since that time, some analysts (including Adam Chandler, who wrote a thought-provoking blog post on the case) have suggested that the Supreme Court should not—indeed, perhaps cannot—grant review on the affirmative action issues in the case because of a procedural wrinkle. In the space below, I explain and examine that wrinkle.

Full Story: http://verdict.justia.com/2011/10/28/an-update-on-the-fisher-v-university-of-texas-affirmative-action-case

Affirmative action opponents petition Supreme Court to review UT case

American Independent
09.20.11 5:32 pm

The University of Texas is once again embroiled in a possible Supreme Court case involving affirmative action in their admissions process. As the Austin American-Statesman reported, lawyers have filed a petition on behalf of a student who’d applied to the school, asking for the Supreme Court to review the UT’s consideration of race in undergraduate admission decisions.
“If any state action should respect racial equality, it is university admission. Selecting those who will benefit from the limited places available at state universities has enormous consequences for their futures and the perceived fairness of governmental action,” lawyers argue in the petition to the Supreme Court.

Full Story: http://www.americanindependent.com/194958/supreme-court-petitioned-to-review-ut-affirmative-action-case

Supreme Court to Decide Wal-Mart Class-Action Lawsuit

Workforce Management
December 7, 2010

The Supreme Court agreed Dec. 6 to decide whether Wal-Mart Stores Inc. must face what could be the largest workplace class-action lawsuit ever certified.The case—Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Betty Dukes et al.—involves charges that Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart paid female employees less than men in comparable positions despite higher performance ratings and seniority. The six female employees who brought the lawsuit, initially filed in 2001, also allege that women received fewer and waited longer for promotions to in-store management positions than men.The lawsuit seeks injunctive and declaratory relief, lost pay and punitive damages.

Full Story: http://www.workforce.com/section/news/article/supreme-court-decide-wal-mart-class-action-lawsuit.php

Breaking! Kagan Memos Reveal Nothing Shocking!

Care2Make a Difference Blog
posted by: Jessica Pieklo 7 hours ago

With confirmation hearings set to begin on June 28, and some 90,000 pages of papers released involving Kagan's work in the law, Senate Republicans are grasping for anything they can to paint Kagan as a leftist ideologue. The problem for those Republicans though is that Kagan is nothing of the sort.What the papers illustrate is Kagan's thinking as a pragmatist and a centrist. Take for example a 1997 memo on an affirmative action case, authored by Kagan when she was a presidential assistant for domestic policy. A New Jersey school district, when given the decision of firing two equally qualified teachers chose to fire the white teacher over the black one and defended the decision based on the grounds that it was part of an overall effort at maintaining diversity in the workplace.

Full Story: http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/breaking-kagan-memos-reveal-nothing-shocking/

Chicago waits for next step in firefighter case

Associated Press
By DEANNA BELLANDI (AP)

CHICAGO — The city of Chicago says it's ready to hire firefighters in a long-running discrimination case if it's ordered to do so now that the U.S. Supreme Court has found a group of black applicants didn't wait too long to sue.
The Supreme Court's decision Monday sent the case back to a lower court. Mara Georges, the city of Chicago's corporation counsel, said the city plans to hire the would-be firefighters if the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago determines it should. City officials say about 111 recruits could be employed.

Full Story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hdV4k6q8whNn7fJ_JhZb5tdIy4ZwD9FTT9800

See also: New York Times: "Black Firefighters’ Claim Was Timely, Justices Say", May 24, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/25scotus.html

Key decisions from the Supreme Court

Lexology
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP
Kevin B Leblang, Robert N Holtzman

When test reveals disparate impact, there may be no correct answer
In Ricci v DeStefano(1) the Supreme Court acknowledged that its task was to provide "guidance to employers" - but the challenge is figuring out exactly what that guidance is. After firefighters in the city of New Haven took a facially neutral promotional test, New Haven did not certify the test because a disproportionately low number of minorities passed it. The plaintiffs sued, accusing New Haven of disparate treatment.
The court framed the case as a question of whether an employer may commit disparate treatment discrimination in order to avoid disparate impact liability. In ruling that New Haven's decision not to certify the test was a race-based action and thus impermissible under Title VII, the court recited a new standard for employers to deal with. The court held that in order for an employer to take such an action, the employer had to have a "strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute".

Full Story: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=94011508-f9c2-4cd8-92ff-050d6770952c&utm_source=Lexology%20Daily%20Newsfeed&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Lexology%20subscriber%20daily%20feed&utm_content=Lexology%20Daily%20Newsfeed%202010-05-06&utm_term=

Chicago judge's record rates highly among progressives, colleagues

http://www.cnn.com/

By Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer
May 4, 2010 2:22 p.m. EDT

Washington (CNN) -- As a young working mother in the the early 1980s, Diane Wood, like many of her generation, struggled to balance work and family.
The future judge and Supreme Court contender had just accepted a job teaching law in Chicago, Illinois, while pregnant with her second child.
Soon after David was born, the professor went into anaphylactic shock and was rushed to the hospital with post-pregnancy complications. Despite her serious condition, she recovered quickly, but really had no choice. Friends say that with two young kids and a new job, no maternity leave was offered, and her male colleagues at work were mostly clueless over how to deal with her.
"People had no idea what to do with the fact that I had these two tiny children," she told an interviewer last year. Overcoming institutional and social challenges to become a nationally recognized legal heavyweight and high court contender, colleagues say, is a testament to Wood's intellectual and personal fortitude.
Her long, relatively liberal judicial record presents both a measure of certainty about the kind of justice she would become, and a political challenge getting her confirmed.
"Diane Wood is among the most respected federal judges on the left," said Thomas Goldstein, a Supreme Court legal analyst and founder of scotusblog.com. "Being a woman is a political plus, but she has decided cases on abortion, affirmative action, religion, and the like. That will generate more of a political firestorm."

Full Story: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/05/04/scotus.contenders.wood/index.html

Hastings defends anti-bias policy at high court

San Francisco Chronicle
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 20, 2010

(04-19) 18:24 PDT WASHINGTON -- UC Hastings College of the Law and a Christian club that excludes gays and lesbians battled before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday over whether the school must recognize and fund the group, a clash between a public university's anti-discrimination policies and a religious organization's right to set its own standards.
The Christian Legal Society, backed by numerous religious and conservative groups, argued that the San Francisco law school was trying to force organizations to surrender their principles in exchange for access to meeting rooms and bulletin boards.
"If Hastings is correct, a student who does not even believe in the Bible is entitled to demand to lead a Christian Bible study," the group's lawyer, Stanford law Professor Michael McConnell, told the justices in Washington. A campus NAACP chapter, he said, "would have to allow a racist skinhead to sit in on its planning meetings."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/20/BAN41D13V0.DTL#ixzz0ldp39rPn

Appreciation: John Paul Stevens, Retiring Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Shirley J. Wilcher , April 15, 2010

On April 9, 2010, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement from the United States Supreme Court. An appointee of President Gerald R. Ford, Justice Stevens is retiring with a distinguished record of jurisprudence in support of equal opportunity through affirmative action.
While he is known for being a “liberal” justice, it may be argued that Stevens, a moderate Republican from the Midwest, remained faithful to his conservative ideals. It was the Court that veered to the right. In the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case (1978), Justice Stevens opposed setting aside 16 out of 100 seats for minority students applying to the University of California at Davis Medical School. He chided the majority in the Adarand Constructors v. Pena minority contracting case, however. In Adarand the Court applied the same level of “strict scrutiny” to programs intended to remedy past discrimination as those intended to impose invidious racial classifications.

Full Editorial: http://diverseeducation.com/article/13707/appreciation-john-paul-stevens-retiring-associate-justice-of-the-u-s-supreme-court.html

Backing for Christian Group in Supreme Court Case

Inside Higher Ed
February 8, 2010

The Christian Legal Society is attracting wide support -- particularly from religious organizations -- in its U.S. Supreme Court battle over whether public colleges and universities can enforce their anti-bias rules against religious groups. In December, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the society's chapter at the Hastings College of Law of the University of California. Hastings maintains that it is within its rights to deny recognition to groups, like the society, that engage in forms of discrimination (against gay people, for example) that the university bars. But the society maintains that enforcing such rules violates its freedom of speech and religion.

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219509

Justices will determine privacy of government workers' messages

CNN.COM
By Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer
December 14, 2009 12:56 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- When Ontario, California, Police Sgt. Jeff Quon used his city-issued text messaging pager to exchange hundreds of personal messages, some of a "sexually explicit" nature, did he have a right to expect those messages would be kept private?
The Supreme Court decided Monday that it will determine whether a police officer has a "reasonable expectation" of privacy on his official wireless two-way text-messaging pager.
The justices accepted a pair of appeals on this free-speech and privacy dispute, and will hear oral arguments in the spring.
At issue is how far a government employer may go to monitor the private communications of its workers when they believe that the use of such equipment is being abused.
And the court will explore whether service providers can be held liable for providing those communications without the consent of the sender.

Full Story: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/12/14/scotus.messaging/index.html

Supreme Court to Decide if College Group Must Allow Gays

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press , December 8, 2009

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court said Monday it will decide whether a California law school violated the constitutional rights of a Christian group by denying it recognition as an official campus organization because it excludes gays and lesbians.

The justices agreed to intervene in a case that pits anti-discrimination policies common on college campuses against freedoms of religion and association.

The Christian Legal Society at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law requires officers and voting members to share their religious beliefs, including that "Christians should not engage in sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman."

Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/article/13254/supreme-court-to-decide-if-college-group-must-allow-gays.html

House, Senate Bills Would Overturn Supreme Court Age Discrimination Ruling

Workforce Management
October 7, 2009

For the second time this year, Congress will try to overturn a Supreme Court ruling on workplace law.
Senate and House bills introduced on Tuesday, October 6, would reverse a June court decision that made it more difficult for employees to sue for age discrimination.
The court held in Gross v. FBL that the plaintiff, Jack Gross, had to prove that age was the only reason that he was demoted from his job as a vice president at FBL Financial Group Inc. in Iowa when the insurance company Farm Bureau merged its Iowa and Kansas operations in 2002.
In a 5-4 decision, the court said that age couldn’t simply be a “motivating factor” in an employment decision; it had to be the decisive cause in order for age discrimination protections to take effect.
But Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa and chairman of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, said that the Supreme Court was in effect “rewriting” the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
The court “invented a new standard that makes it prohibitively difficult for a victim to prove age discrimination,” Harkin said at a Capitol Hill news conference. “This extraordinarily high burden radically undermines older workers’ ability to hold employers accountable.”
A bill written by Harkin and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, clarifies that when a victim shows age to be among the reasons for an adverse job decision, an employer must prove that it would have taken the action regardless of the employee’s age.
Titled the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act, the bill has a House companion introduced by Rep. George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
It’s too early to tell how the measure might affect employers, according to Leslie Silverman, a partner at Proskauer Rose in Washington and a former member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Much will depend on the legislative details.

Full Story: http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/71/78.php

Race issues may define Roberts court

projo.com
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. wants to outlaw affirmative action, and his tenure will end up linked with the issue of race, CNN senior analyst Jeffrey Toobin predicted at Brown University.
Roberts is not identified with any one issue the way the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was identified with states’ rights, Toobin said. “But I think he will be, and I think that issue is race. I think he is determined to put his mark on the court, which is the so-called colorblind Constitution. I think he wants to outlaw all affirmative action — in admissions, in employment.”
Toobin noted the Roberts court struck down school-integration plans in Louisville and Seattle, and ruled for white firefighters who said New Haven, Conn., violated their rights by throwing out the results of a promotional test on which few minorities scored well. (The New Haven ruling struck down a decision by a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel that included Sonia Sotomayor, who is now on the Supreme Court).
Roberts is pushing the court to the right ideologically, Toobin said. “He is not a caretaker chief justice. He is a very conservative person judicially, politically, personally.”
Toobin — a lawyer who is also a New Yorker staff writer and the author of books such as The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court — spoke at Brown on Thursday to mark the 25th anniversary of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.
In response to a question from the audience, Toobin said the country’s first black president has been outspoken on many issues. “But when was the last time you heard him say anything about affirmative action?” he asked. “Like, never.”

Full Story: http://www.projo.com/news/efitzpatrick/edward_fitzpatrick_13_10-13-09_8KG222F_v26.345f9e0.html#

Stevens is on the legal front lines

UPI.com
Published: Oct. 4, 2009 at 9:35 AM
MICHAEL KIRKLAND

Justice John Paul Stevens' 34 years on the U.S. Supreme Court have been anything but typical -- seen as the leader of the court's four-member liberal bloc, Stevens described himself in 2007 as a "conservative" -- but he has been in the forefront for most of the major issues of his time.Now in what may be the twilight of his service -- Stevens has hired only one clerk so far, the normal allotment for a retired justice -- a look back at his tenure shows how central he was to many of the court's greatest cases.Various analyses of Supreme Court voting place him either in the center of the court's jurisprudence or firmly in the liberal wing, all based on the same cases.Stevens joined the Supreme Court in 1975, taking the oath two days after being unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate.His Library of Congress biography says new justices on the court are usually seen but little heard, typically joining majorities or dissents but seldom writing themselves. However, in his first term on the court, Stevens wrote 17 separate majority concurrences, agreeing with the judgment of the majority but disagreeing on some of the details, and 27 separate dissents -- far more opinions than any other justice that term.Over the last three and a half decades, Stevens has made himself felt on the major issues before the court. And his quiet questions from the bench uncharacteristically cause the other members -- who sometimes like to interrupt -- to shut up and listen.Stevens helped restore the death penalty in 1976, one of three authors of the majority opinion declaring it constitutional, but has come to question its effectiveness and constitutionality in recent years.On abortion, 1992's Planned Parenthood vs. Casey found a broken majority of five justices upholding Roe vs. Wade, 1973's recognition of a woman's right to an abortion. But the majority was comprised of several pluralities, and Stevens wrote his own opinion concurring in the judgment but objecting to its restrictions on when an abortion should be allowed."My disagreement with the joint opinion begins with its understanding of the trimester framework established in Roe," Stevens wrote. "Contrary to the suggestion of the joint opinion … it is not a 'contradiction' to recognize that the state may have a legitimate interest in potential human life and, at the same time, to conclude that that interest does not justify the regulation of abortion before viability (although other interests, such as maternal health, may). The fact that the state's interest is legitimate does not tell us when, if ever, that interest outweighs the pregnant woman's interest in personal liberty."Stevens joined the majority in 2000's Stenberg vs. Carhart striking down Nebraska's ban on "partial-birth abortion." But he wrote separately to cast scorn on the central idea of the Nebraska law, that there is a significant difference between "dilation and evacuation," which involves dilation of the cervix, removal of at least some fetal tissue -- which Nebraska allowed -- and the method which the state tried to partly ban, a variation of D&E, known as "intact D&E," used after 16 weeks."Intact D&E" involves removing the fetus from the uterus through the cervix "intact," in one pass rather than several passes, including the feet-first method is known as "dilation and extraction" (D&X), ordinarily called "partial birth abortion.""Although much ink is spilled today describing the gruesome nature of late-term abortion procedures," Stevens wrote, "that rhetoric does not provide me a reason to believe that the procedure Nebraska here claims it seeks to ban is more brutal, more gruesome, or less respectful of 'potential life' than the equally gruesome procedure Nebraska claims it still allows. ... The rhetoric is almost, but not quite, loud enough to obscure the quiet fact that during the past 27 years, the central holding of Roe v. Wade ... has been endorsed by all but four of the 17 Justices who have addressed the issue. That holding -- that the word 'liberty' in the 14th Amendment includes a woman's right to make this difficult and extremely personal decision -- makes it impossible for me to understand how a state has any legitimate interest in requiring a doctor to follow any procedure other than the one that he or she reasonably believes will best protect the woman in her exercise of this constitutional liberty."Stevens also joined the four-member dissent in the 2007 case that upheld the 2003 federal ban on "partial-birth abortions."On affirmative action, Stevens has moved from right to left over the years.In 1978's University of California Regents vs. Bakke, Stevens wrote a concurrence supporting the plurality opinion that struck down the university system's policy that prevented a qualified candidate's admission because he was white.But in 2003's Grutter vs. Bollinger, Stevens joined the 5-4 majority upholding the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan's Law School admissions program. The majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the policy was "narrowly tailored" to achieve the goal of a diverse student body and did not violate the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment.

Full Story: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/10/04/Stevens-is-on-the-legal-front-lines/UPI-94591254663300/