A three-judge federal panel told South Carolina this week that the state could not enforce its new voter photo ID law until after the November elections. There is not enough time to educate voters about the law’s complexities, the court said, noting further that rushing the rules into effect could have “racially discriminatory” outcomes because
THE founding principle of affirmative action was fairness. After years of oppression, it seemed folly to judge blacks by the same measures as whites.
Read more in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/sunday-review/rethinking-affirmative-action.html?src=rechp
Conservatives regularly rail against liberal bias in academe, but rarely do such complaints turn into lawsuits that make it all the way to trial. On Monday, Teresa R. Wagner gets to make that argument in a federal court in Davenport, Iowa. She maintains that University of Iowa law-school faculty turned her down for teaching jobs
WASHINGTON — With the future of affirmative action in higher education hanging in the balance, the Supreme Court on Wednesday grappled with two basic questions, repeated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in various forms at least a dozen times.
Read more in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/us/a-changed-court-revisits-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions.html?_r=1&ref=education
T. Alan Hurwitz, Gallaudet’s president, said in a statement on Wednesday that he had placed the official on leave for participating in an effort “that some feel is inappropriate for an individual serving as chief diversity officer.” She allegedly signed a petition to put on the Maryland ballot this November a measure opposing same-sex
When we examine controversial topics and the respective arguments made for each side, sometimes we see one group reaching for support that stretches a point so far that it looks more like desperation than reasoning. The quality of evidence is so flimsy and thin that we don’t wonder whether it’s right or wrong. We ask,
Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Abigail Fisher’s case against the University of Texas at Austin, a lighthearted joke made the rounds at the Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies here on the flagship campus. At its core was a high-energy fifth-year student from Houston named Tedra Jacobs.
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As the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin, it became evident that the court’s past rulings on such policies have failed to provide colleges—or even the justices themselves—with clear guidance.
Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Supreme-Court-Hearing-Exposes/134976/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
In 1994, California voters passed the harshest three-strikes law in the country. Soon after, stories began to emerge about people receiving life sentences for petty crimes such as stealing a pair of gloves or a slice of pizza. Such cases challenged the commonly held belief that the law applied only to violent criminals.
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WASHINGTON — The last time the Supreme Court heard a major affirmative action case about admission to public universities, in April 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was at the court’s ideological center. And it was she who wrote the majority opinion in the court’s 5-to-4 ruling allowing race to be considered in admission decisions, as