Justice Antonin Scalia questions place of some black students in elite colleges

Bert Rein, representing Fisher, said the university can take other steps to diversify its student body without explicit reference to race, including reducing its reliance on standardized test scores.

Hearings began yesterday in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, brought on by one-time UT applicant Abigail Fisher.

“It’s kind of the assumption that if a black student or a Hispanic student is admitted as part of the top 10 percent plan, it has to be because that student didn’t have to compete against very many whites and Asians”. At no point did Scalia say he disagrees with “those who contend” that African-American students who struggle at good universities and are better off at “a slower-track school”.

The court’s ruling on the Fisher case is expected in June 2016. The longtime 15th district legislator asked the justice about his Trenton roots and learned that Scalia had an aunt who still lived in Chambersburg. Outside the court, Fisher said that she was “humbled and grateful” that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case again.

“Most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas”, he said. According to the New York Times, when discussing the court’s decision to protect gay rights with students from Georgetown University, he said, “The Supreme Court’s decisions protecting gay rights were not rooted in the Constitution, and their logic could as easily apply to child molesters”.

Affirmative action programs, which have been in place for years at many us colleges and universities, are meant to produce a more robust representation of different cultures on campuses and offer opportunities to minority students who may not have had the same academic inroads experienced by some white students.

Whether affirmative action is actually eliminated, though, will depend less on Roberts and Scalia and more on Supreme Court swing justice Anthony Kennedy.

While students at higher ranked schools might do worse in class, they’re still more likely to pass the bar and become lawyers. Shortly after Scalia’s comments first circulated on social media, the hashtag #BlackTexasEx was born, referring to the university’s Texas Exes alumni organization.

After Texas instituted its Top 10 Percent rule in 1997, which guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas to the top 10 percent of each graduating high school class in the state, graduation rates increased, despite lower preparedness among University of Texas students. “And that just – we’re just arguing the same case”.

Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservative justices came out against the affirmative action policy, but none with quite as much vitriol as Antonin Scalia, who wondered if the minority students now accepted into UT deserve to be there.

Justice Elena Kagan, who usually votes with the liberals, recused herself from the case, presumably because she worked on the issue when she was President Obama’s solicitor general.