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HONOLULU (AP) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a dispute over whether to identify students challenging a private school system's admissions policy that gives preference to those of Hawaiian ancestry. The court's action ends the lawsuit and leaves in place lower court rulings against four non-Hawaiian students who objected to the Kamehameha Schools' policy. The challengers, who applied for admission to Kamehameha in the 2008-09 school year, wanted to file their lawsuit anonymously because of concerns about public humiliation and retaliation if they were identified. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2009, but the students'...

Shirley Sherrod, litigant and co-mastermind of the Pigford settlement, which bestowed large checks on 86,000 of the country's 40,000 black farmers, ironically may help usher in a long-overdue post-racial era in America. Publicity, once the ally of the racial grievance industry, is now the enemy of deals done in quiet. After Dan Riehl linked to a law firm that specializes in filing complaints in the Pigford settlement for a 33.5% contingency fee -- Pogust, Braslow & Millrood, LLC, in Conshohoken, Pennsylvania -- their site at http://www.blackfarmersjustice.com seems to have gone offline. Riehl notes this language from the law firm's 2008...

... [W]hat Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented...

Shortly after assuming his position, Attorney General Eric Holder called America a “nation of cowards” because we were too afraid to speak about race. My former colleague Congressman Steve King (R-IA) recently tried to initiate a discussion, and the Democrats and politically correct Republicans are castigating him. Rep. King told a talk show host that “the president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race — on the side that favors the black person.” He stood by his remarks stating that there “appears to me to be an inclination on the...

... Across the country, selective public colleges and universities are taking a page from their private counterparts and implementing what is commonly called a holistic or comprehensive admissions process. ... At Santa Barbara, the comprehensive review process was implemented in the late 1990’s, and across the entire system in 2002. Susan A. Wilbur, the system’s director of undergraduate admissions, says it enables the selection committee to view applicants in light of their socio-­economic and educational backgrounds. “We call this ‘achievement in context,’ ” she says. “We don’t want to compare a student who’s attending a well-resourced school with a student...

How Obama's Supreme Court pick revived the affirmative action debate The debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has revived the debate over racial preferences—not only because of speculation that Sotomayor herself is an "affirmative action" pick as a Hispanic woman, but also because of her role in the controversial case of Ricci v. DeStefano. It involves a lawsuit by 18 firefighters (17 whites and one Hispanic) in New Haven, Connecticut, denied promotions to lieutenant and captain because no black applicants passed the test. Fearing charges of race discrimination, the city threw out the test and left...

Why libertarians—and everyone who believes in limited government—should worry about Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomineePresident Barack Obama's announcement that he wants federal appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter comes as something less than a shock. For months, Sotomayor's name has topped most lists of potential candidates. With her compelling personal story, which stretches from a Bronx, New York housing project to Yale Law School to the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sotomayor's likely appointment as the Court's first Hispanic justice nicely complements Obama's own "only in America" narrative. But when it comes to her...

President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House. If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court. The president reached his decision over the long Memorial Day...

The noblest-sounding justification for racial preferences—that they lift up their beneficiaries—may soon be exposed as fraudulent. A group of law professors and economists examining the effect of law school admissions preferences on students’ bar-exam passage rates is suing the State Bar of California to obtain data for their study. The proposed research could deal a death blow to the quota regime by proving that affirmative action actually damages a student’s chances of becoming a lawyer. Predictably, the race industry has mobilized to crush the project.

While choosing between tickets featuring Barack Obama or Sarah Palin this November, voters in Colorado and Nebraska will also be able to bury the idea that blacks and women in America still need special help to get ahead. In those states, the ballot will carry civil rights initiatives to end race and gender preferences in public hiring and education. Led by Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute, the measures would take a chip out of racial preferences that have committed the same kinds of discrimination they were designed to prevent. If passing laws to ban discrimination sounds like a triumph...

The former dean of the University of Washington School of Law said Friday that Nebraska universities must be ready to adjust if voters approve a measure to ban most types of affirmative action in the state. W.H. “Joe” Knight Jr.’s message to the Nebraska Legal Diversity Summit in Omaha: “Prepare yourselves.” In 1998, voters in Washington approved a similar measure. Knight said minority enrollment decreased immediately, and has just now started to catch up because of the university’s hard work — and more money spent — on recruitment. Schools have also sought more scholarships from private donors, who can designate...

Have racial preferences reduced the number of black lawyers? Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not. Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit...

June 28, 2007, 3:50 p.m. Diversity without Decrees By The Editors In a 5-4 decision Thursday morning, the Supreme Court struck down race-based school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle. Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court is narrow, and is further weakened by a concurring opinion in which Justice Anthony Kennedy blesses some level of color-consciousness to achieve racial diversity in K-12 education. Yet the ruling is also a victory for those who think race plays too large a role in public life. Using different formulae, the school districts of Louisville and Seattle tried to manipulate the...

Racial tiebreaker will stand By Sanjay Bhatt Seattle Times staff reporter The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld Seattle Public Schools' use of race as a tiebreaker in assigning students to popular high schools, and the plaintiffs vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling comes on the heels of decisions by federal appellate judges in the 1st and 6th Circuits upholding local school authorities' use of race as a factor in student-assignment plans in Massachusetts and Kentucky. Plaintiffs in all three cases sued on the basis that the school districts' plans violated their individual rights...

Some low income San Jose area schools have seen a dramatic increase in college attendance rates in the last few years. And it wasn't because of race-based set asides and preferences. It was because students from San Jose State University worked in these schools to help create a college going culture. (Click Pic For More) Craig DeLuzVisit The Home of Uncommon Sense… www.craigdeluz.com

These ought to be heady days for values-voting Republicans, but legal and cultural conservatives are waiting with bated breath in one area that has long been important to them: affirmative action. There were some exceptions to this do-nothing approach. The most famous were the amicus briefs filed by the Justice Department with the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan admission-preference cases. The administration argued that the university’s discrimination was illegal; even here, however, the position was squishy. The Justice Department had wanted to adopt a relatively clear line that a simple desire for “diversity” could not justify something...

Sometimes schools do silly things, particularly in the name of racial diversity, that, more frequently, only deepen racial division. When Jason Mattera, a student at Roger Williams University, offered a controversial “whites only” scholarship to students at the school, the project drew national criticism. “Fifty radio stations had me on with the local director of the NAACP,” Mattera remembered in an appearance before Accuracy in Academia’s Conservative University conference in July. Mattera, who heads the College Republicans at Roger Williams, remembered that even the state GOP wanted no part of the project, which he said was intended to parody government...

Change applies to health sciences COLLEGE STATION -- In a historic move for the Texas A&M University System, race will now be considered when deciding which students to admit to its Health Science Center. The university's Board of Regents agreed unanimously on the change Friday as a way to boost minority enrollment in the center, which includes a medical and dental school. "We just want a variety of socioeconomic (backgrounds), life experiences and perceptions," said Nancy W. Dickey, the center's president. The decision comes as the university system continues an ongoing debate over how to best diversify its homogenous campuses....

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark decision in which the Supreme Court struck down race-based student assignments in public schools. Ironically, next month will then mark the one-year anniversary of Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Court upheld the use of race-based student admissions in universities. It is not surprising that, when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor blessed the use of racial preferences to achieve "diversity" at the University of Michigan law school this past June, she must have felt guilty about playing fast and loose with the Constitution's ban...

A national coalition to defend affirmative action, known as By Any Means Necessary, is working to overturn Proposition 209 and bring affirmative action back to California. Proposition 209, which voters passed in 1996, banned affirmative action in the state. The coalition hopes to convince the University of California administration to begin using affirmative action in hope of bringing a lawsuit from a conservative group. "We're assuming that the right wing ... will sue and we'll get the chance to bring down (Proposition) 209 in court," said Luke Massie, the national co-chair of By Any Means Necessary. Fifty years after the...