Supreme Court Sanity

[womzilla]

If they keep this up, they'll get themselves impeached.

Today's Lawrence decision was two days too early to be a perfect birthday gift for the Stonewall riots, but I think it will be accepted despite that.

The decision in the Michigan cases was less untarnished, but I was pleasantly surprised. I called my lawyer sister, who worked on the UofM undergraduate brief (Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003), and she was almost beside herself with joy over how things had turned out. Yes, she said, in a perfect world the justices would have recognized that the U of M undergraduate policy--using numerical rankings for a first sort of applications--is appropriate given the size of the pool of applicants. But given the current composition of the court, the decision in the U of Michigan Law School case (Grutter v. Bollinger 2003) was a ringing endorsement of affirmative action better than which they could not reasonably have hoped. I mentioned to her my fear that the split decision boiled down to "affirmative action is okay, but any system to actually implement it is not okay", but she thinks that's unreasonably pessimistic. I certainly hope she's right, and, after all, she's the lawyer.

Comments

[tim-maroney.livejournal.com]

The sodomy decision that was overturned had been in effect a parting gift to Chief Justice Warren Burger on his departure from the Court in 1986. The decision was widely criticized in the press at the time; Burger's consenting opinion drew heavily from the Bible, and pointed out that homosexuality was punishable by death under Roman law.

The press also observed that the Court rarely reverses itself on less than a quarter-century time scale, so perhaps we are running just a bit ahead of schedule on this one.

The AA decision seems tepid to me and I would not be surprised to see it effectively neutralized by further restrictive rulings.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Well, the actual decision in the Michigan Law School case outright endorsed the goal of affirmative action, saying that "diversity"--that is, racial diversity--is an active good which governments are allowed to pursue. As I said, my initial reaction was negative, but our Dear Sister definitely viewed the pair of decisions as a triumph for her side, even though the case she actually worked on (the undergrad case) was decided against her client. So I'm deferring to her optimism and hoping for the best.

[tim-maroney.livejournal.com]

Yes, recognition that AA serves an important public good is important and positive, no question. There's just something about this case that suggests to me they're going to ring it in difficult or impossible conditions as more cases are brought before them. The burden of demonstrating that the good of racial diversity outweighs the evil of racial discrimination could be made a very heavy one.

Your sister sounds nice -- I'll have to meet her some time.

Oh, BTW, I'm an Adobe employee now, and my next book appearance will be in October. (I just got my check, a whopping penny a word.) Hope things are working out well for you these days too -- sounded like it at last report...