One of the most closely watched cases—if not the most closely watched case—on this year’s Supreme Court docket is the challenge to the University of Texas’ race-based affirmative action program, Fisher v. University of Texas. In Fisher, the Court will decide whether the Constitution leaves any room for public universities to use the race of individual student applicants in the admissions process.
The Supreme Court Term that begins in October, like the one that wound down this past June, features some potentially momentous cases. Perhaps the biggest case on the Court’s 2012–13 docket so far is Fisher v. University of Texas, a case in which the Justices will take up once again the extent to which public higher educational institutions can make use of an individual’s race at the admissions stage. (I have written a number of other columns on Fisher, including one viewable here (Part One) and here (Part Two), that provide additional background.)
’Tis the season to be a college protestor. With a momentous presidential election on the horizon, the Occupy Movement promising to kick into high gear again, and young adults facing uncertain job prospects and ever-increasing higher education costs and debt loads, students at campuses across the country are understandably seeking ways of demonstrating their deep discontent and anxiety about the status quo.
“I’m a self-loathing law student,” confessed one of the students in my Critical Race Theory seminar this week. Several others immediately owned up to the same affliction. I will stipulate that self-loathing is probably not an affect we all should strive to achieve. But I was heartened anyway.
Analysts of the same-sex marriage legal saga are trying to read the tea leaves from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit's oral argument held last Monday. The argument took up the federal constitutional challenge to California's Proposition 8, a state constitutional initiative limiting marriage to a union between a man and a woman.
The most read and the most emailed piece on the Time Magazine site right now is Joel Stein's "My Own Private India." In it Stein says that the increasing presence of Indian-Americans in his hometown of Edison, New Jersey "bothers[] me so much."
Faced with a flurry of criticism, Time Magazine has now posted the following non-apology apology:
The life of a dean at times can be hectic. Last week, for example, I was meeting for wonderful alumni lunch followed by an evening reception with alums down in Silicon Valley. A few days later, I watched alums, students, Professor Peter Lee, and a “ringer” or two play some inspired basketball in a charity tournament for public interest fellowships at the UC Davis School of Laws.
