Supreme Court to issue separate rulings on affirmative action in college admissions
Pete Williams, NBC News, July 22, 2022
The court agreed in January to take up the issue by granting two cases — one involving Harvard, a private university, and the other from the University of North Carolina, a public institution. The two cases were consolidated, meaning they were to be argued and decided together. The Supreme Court has long barred racial quotas in admissions. But it has allowed schools to consider a student’s race to be one “plus factor” among many other qualities, provided the admissions process looks at the overall qualifications of applicants and uses race no more than necessary to achieve a level of diversity.
The Supreme Court will hear the cases in its next term, which begins in October. (More)
That news, which came in a brief order from the court, was not unexpected: It allows Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s newest justice, to participate in one of the cases, involving the consideration of race in the University of North Carolina’s undergraduate admissions process, while recusing herself from a similar case involving Harvard University, where she recently completed a six-year term on the university’s board of overseers. (More)
SCOTUS clerks crafting opinions this autumn will be overwhelmingly white and male
Hanna Kang Thu, July 21, 2022 at 5:43 PM
The latest Supreme Court clerk lineup is less diverse than previous cohorts in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity — and vastly lags the country as a whole, according to an official list of clerks provided by the Court’s Public Information Office to law newsletter Original Jurisdiction.
There are 38 clerks in the class, nearly 70% are men (25), while women make up a little over 30% (13). Last year’s clerk class was almost evenly split, an improvement from the 2019 and 2020 clerk classes, which were both nearly 60% male. The new class, which will closely assist the nation’s powerful jurists, is the least gender-balanced one since 2017.
David Lat at Original Jurisdiction reported that the new class is “a throwback to the first 12 years of the Roberts Court (2005-2017), a period in which only a third of clerks were women.” This development stands in contrast to the evolving gender makeup of law schools, where female students are now a majority, according to the American Bar Association’s 2021 Profile of the Legal Profession.
The new clerk class also appears to lack in diversity in terms of race or ethnicity. While the Supreme Court does not release information about the race or ethnicity of clerks, Lat’s research indicates that two clerks are Black, two are Hispanic, and two are Asian. (More)