141–150 of 1001 posts
> Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, has been the boldest defender of what she prefers to call “race-sensitive” admission policies and has referred to herself as the “perfect affirmative action child.” That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with legislation via judicial branch being a bad idea. However, affirmative action isn't legislation. This is judicial review striking down policy (executive branch interpretation and implementation of legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
Judicial review has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies for 40+ years, what changed is the composition of the Supreme Court and its related willingness to legislate from the bench -- abandoning stare decisis and judicial restraint. We saw this with Roe last year.
I don't like many recent rulings from SCOTUS, but intellectual honesty forces me to admit that when the pendulum was on the other side, the same thing happened with different allegiances.
I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will c…
The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it. I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscell...
I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will c…
The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it. I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admis...
Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered.
IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.
Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
But somehow, some people only feel the need to mention it when they don't like the result.
Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that the…
Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case.
They did no such thing.
They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.
> Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down? Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the…
The court changing their mind feels like a feature not a bug. The court represents people, and those people change their mind from generation to generation. I don't want to live in a world where we can't overturn bad decisions. Would America be better off if we legalized slavery 300 years ago, and could never undo it?
This game we're playing is we now have one legislative body that writes laws and another that writes effectively constitutional amendments. This makes no sense at all and we've created an in-practice unchecked branch of government.
So I don't disagree that the court has done good things with their power but once in a generation swings is much easier to put up with than what we have going now. The world hasn't meaningfully changed since they originally upheld universities' limited ability to discriminate and as much as I don't like that choice I still think take-backsies is a worse one.
My (red) state has a bill going through right now to outlaw university diversity quotas and it likely won't pass so this isn't cultural attitudes changing.
I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upb…
All we’ve done is create new grievances among poor whites to justify the guilt of upper class whites about things their grandparents did. Those people are rightly upset that the government has been openly racist to them their entire lives.
How did that help? — I mean, besides soothing the feelings of elites that they’re not bigots, even though they made 1950s style racist policies about “too many” Jews and Asians in their universities. (Which is what triggered this lawsuit…)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with legislation via judicial branch being a bad idea. However, affirmative action isn't legislation. This is judicial review striking down policy (executive branch interpretation and implementation of legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
Judicial review has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies for 40+ years, what changed is the composition of the Supreme Court and its related willingness to legislate from the bench -- abandoning stare decisis and judicial restraint. We saw this with Roe last year.
A lot of the logic of Roe v Wade was based on viability outside of a womb based on medical science of the time.
Right in the decision of affirmative action there is admission that it will need to be revisited.