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Notes -
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".
But this goes to show how great of power SCOTUS wields, not just absolute power but also relative power, as other branches struggle to do anything. Passing legislation is like giving birth, but SCOTUS can nullify laws deemed unconstitutional (which the court gets to decide what qualifies as such) or set precedent, at the stroke of a pen. Presidential elections are less about policy, but about choosing judges, whose rulings can have far and reaching consequences long after the confetti is cleaned up.
Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly. The same thing was made illegal in CA, and it just meant that measures that whites/Asians did well at got devalued in college applications.
They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.
But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.
I suspect the money isn’t there and that the cases will be very hard to prove. Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission. Essays, life-experience, and in some cases meeting the students can give admissions officers plenty of “I-can’t-believe-it’s-race” reasons to exclude whites and Asians. Your essay about visiting your ancestral home in Korea might simply not meet standards. Had nothing to do with you outting yourself as Asian. We just didn’t like the essay.
But this is not the way American anti-discrimination law works. For decades lawyers and civil-rights bureaucrats have been successfully going after every more implicit forms of putative discrimination. "Here's my statistical evidence that Foo has a disparate impact on Bar. I was FooBarred, now give me $$$$$$$" is standard practice.
That cat really will be among the pigeons if the Court can make that particular sword cut both ways. My guess is that over time the court system will follow the leader, but the EEOC will not unless the Republicans take over the government and gut the thing.
As far as bringing a case sure, but I don’t think anyone wins the case. In most employment cases, you actually have a hard time because of at will employment. I can fire you if I don’t like your haircut. This makes those kinds of cases hard to prove because unless you have some sort of evidence in your possession that race figured into it at all, the defense simply has to cite any other reasons why you got fired and unless you have proof or witnesses, they win.
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