Category Archive

The Trump administration is to be commended for the new regulations that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, aimed at changing the disparate-impact approach used in the Obama administration. This is the approach whereby a defendant can be held liable for housing discrimination when it has a policy that is nondiscriminatory on its face, is evenhandedly applied, and was adopted with no discriminatory intent — but which leads to politically incorrect statistical imbalances. So, for example, if a landlord would prefer not to rent to individuals with a history of …

The Justice’s Best Work At the top of my (short) list of “Stevens in Memory” is John Paul Stevens’s separate opinion in the Bakke case, decided in 1978. You’ll recall Allan Bakke, especially if you repair even just occasionally to this site. Bakke was the aspiring medical student who despite strong academic credentials was rejected by the Medical School at the University of California at Davis. Bakke, who is white, sued, alleging racial discrimination inasmuch as the school gave him less of an opportunity than it did minority students to compete for a seat. As I saw the case then …

It’s hard to know how to weigh in on the Biden-and-busing controversy, since the definition of “busing” is itself uncertain; since it’s hard to tell what Joe Biden means to say now, let alone what he meant to say decades ago; and since the criticism of him by his political opponents is so likely to be deceptive as well. But these thoughts: 1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color. 2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing …

By now you’ve probably read about the “college admissions scandal,” the dubious work of a man named William Singer, a college counselor who helped students from wealthy students get into elite schools by cheating on tests and using false athletic credentials. Now the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, has added to it in an article reporting that Singer also “advised some families to falsely claim students were racial minorities.” Singer let families know that their applicant sons and daughters might be at a “competitive disadvantage” if they didn’t opt for misrepresentation as minorities. He wound up pleading guilty to …

The Supreme Court recently agreed to review cases presenting the questions whether sexual orientation and transgender status are “sex” within the meaning of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — that is, whether the prohibition in federal employment law against discrimination on the basis of sex includes bans on sexual-orientation and transgender-status discrimination. The answer, of course, is no:  When Congress wrote in 1964 that employers may not discriminate on the basis of sex, they meant — those words meant — that employers could not treat men and women differently, and nobody would have thought that the word …

In a splendid report of good news, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Right has reached an agreement to resolve a complaint filed against Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC), which is part of the large state university in Lubbock, Texas. Health Sciences has five separate schools, and the complaint (made by the Center for Equal Opportunity) concerned whether the current use of race in admissions by any of the schools is legal. They are: the School of Allied Health; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Nursing; the School of Pharmacy; and the School of Medicine. …

Like most people, I have good days and bad days on my job.  Sometimes you feel like you’re getting ahead, and some days not so much. At the Center for Equal Opportunity, getting ahead means stopping the powers that be from using race-based decision-making — that is, from treating Americans differently on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors they came from.  That means saying no to old-fashioned, politically incorrect discrimination, of course, but also to today’s more fashionable and politically correct discrimination:  affirmative action and the use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement.  And …

Stopping Discrimination Assuming that the Roberts Court remains conservative for at least the next two or three years, Roberts should have chances to vote to overrule several liberal precedents, arguably the most important being Grutter v. Bollinger, the racial admissions preferences case from ages ago (2003 to be exact). Currently there are two race cases in early stages of litigation either of which might make it to the Supreme Court by 2021. One is a challenge to preferences underway at Harvard and the other a challenge to the racial admissions at the University of North Carolina. The Court may be …

With major lawsuits on affirmative action pending, it might be useful to review some essential points. The place to start, of course, is with the Constitution, which, together with federal law, forbids government discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. Government runs afoul of the law when it “classifies” or distinguishes among people in terms of their race and takes action against them. That happened in World War II. During “the crisis of war and of threatened invasion,” the federal government prohibited all people of Japanese descent from West Coast military zones. The government defended against challenges to its …

Three years ago I wrote this piece about Westchester County for The Weekly Standard. What piqued my interest was the county’s decision to quit seeking federal housing grants. There is, of course, no obligation upon a county to pursue such grants (not to mention a variety of others). But the, shall we say, guts it took for Westchester to shake off the grant—seeking habit were notable then and still are in a nation (alas) of coercive federalism, and too little freedom. Forty-five municipalities and communities make up Westchester County, the prosperous, heavily Democratic jurisdiction just north of New York City …