court

DEI’s Inevitable Descent into Legal Trouble

Depending on which side of the political aisle you choose, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” better known as DEI, stands for very different things. For the far-left, who have largely coopted and infected their less radical comrades, it is something inherently good and imbued in America’s DNA. In response to increasing demands for dialing down DEI […]

Read More

Proving Discrimination Is Almost Impossible

Teresa Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa law school ended a few weeks ago when a jury declared that the school did not submit her to political discrimination when it rejected her application for a job. Wagner made a second allegation–that her equal protection rights were violated because the law school held her political […]

Read More

The Sixth Circuit Undermines Affirmative Action

On November 6 the voters of Oklahoma, following in the footsteps of voters in California (1996), Washington (1998), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), and Arizona (2010), passed  a constitutional amendment that prohibits the state from offering “preferred treatment” or engaging in discrimination based on race, color, gender, or ethnicity. On November 15 eight of the fifteen […]

Read More

An Unusually Stupid Court Ruling

Yesterday the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that Michigan’s Proposal 2 violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.  Proposal 2 was a ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to provide that state and local government agencies (including public universities) in Michigan “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]

Read More

FIRE Singes the Censors

How time flies. In 1987, a new breed of speech and harassment codes and student indoctrination were unleashed on college campuses across the land. Thus, what Allan Kors and Harvey Silverglate famously labeled the “shadow university”–the university dedicated to censorship and politically correct paternalism–is now at least 25 years old. The public recognized the consequences of […]

Read More

Iowa and the Groupthink Academy

That certain quarters of the academy–humanities departments, most social sciences departments, and many graduate programs (social work, education, and to a lesser extent law)–are ideologically imbalanced is not news. A decision in an Iowa court, however, exposed the difficulty in addressing the problem. The case, which received extensive coverage in the Des Moines Register and […]

Read More

Texas: Racial Preferences Now, Racial Preferences Forever!

The University of Texas has filed its main brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, and it’s a doozy. It argues, among other oddities, that the continuing “underrepresentation” of blacks and Hispanics requires the continued use of racial preferences to increase their numbers, but that the reason for increasing their numbers has nothing to do […]

Read More

Surprise! 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Affirms Obvious!

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (I am tempted to say even the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) has once again recognized that treating people without regard to race does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. In an opinion released April 2, a three-judge panel reaffirmed in no uncertain terms a 1997 Ninth Circuit decision holding […]

Read More

Keeton Defense Contradicts NAS Principles

As I noted previously, a three-judge panel of 11th Circuit made a troubling decision in the Jennifer Keeton case. But it did so not because it declined to reinstate Keeton, a Counseling student who said that she would recommend “conversion therapy” for prospective teenage clients who were gay and lesbian. As the decision noted, Keeton […]

Read More

From the Sixth Circuit: Good News, Bad News

There’s good news out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit: On Friday, the full court agreed to rehear a now infamous decision in which a three-judge panel had earlier struck down the state of Michigan’s Proposal 2.  Proposal 2, in turn, is a ban on government discrimination and preference on the basis of […]

Read More

The 6th Circuit’s Astonishing Defense of Racial Preferences

A divided three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit has issued a remarkable decision striking down the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited state institutions from contracting.” In 2006, Michigan voters had approved the measure, by a 16-point margin. Voters in other blue states, such as California and Washington, have endorsed similar measures. Judges Guy Cole and […]

Read More

The Fifth Circuit Broadens Racial Preferences

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit not only upheld racial preferences in college admissions decisions on Jan. 18 but upheld them with a vengeance. The Fifth Circuit’s three-judge panel unanimously agreed, in Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin, that UT’s flagship campus in Austin could consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity […]

Read More