Several major Supreme Court rulings came out on Thursday, including what amounts to a rejection of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration as well as an opinion upholding the affirmative action admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin. This post will be updated as more rulings come out, check back on Monday for the next wave of decisions.

Here is Law Street’s editorial team with what you need to know:

Update–June 26 rulings:

Corruption: McDonnell v. United States

The decision: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously to overturn corruption convictions of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife. However, there is still a possibility that they can be retried under the court’s new interpretation of the law.

Click here to read a full analysis of the ruling and what it means for the future of political bribery.

Abortion Restrictions: Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt

The decision: In a 5-3 ruling, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s restrictive regulations on abortion clinics. Justices Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy joined Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan to provide the majority necessary to overturn Texas’s House Bill 2. The ruling concluded that the restrictions placed an undue burden on women seeking an abortion.

Click here to read a full analysis of the ruling and what it might mean for similar abortion restrictions in other states.

Gun Control: Voisine v. United States

The decision: The 6-2 ruling prevents anyone convicted of “reckless domestic assault” from being able to own firearms.

Click here to read a full analysis of the ruling and what it might mean for gun control.

Immigration: United States v. Texas

The decision: With the court in a 4-4 split, the decision of the Fifth Circuit is upheld, blocking president Obama’s executive action on immigration, namely DAPA and the expansion of DACA.

Click here to read a full analysis of the ruling and what it means for immigrants in the United States.

Affirmative Action: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin

The decision: The Supreme Court ruled that the University of Texas at Austin can, legally, continue to factor race into admissions decisions.

Click here to read a full analysis of the ruling and what it means for the future of affirmative action.

The Fourth Amendment: Utah v. Strieff

The decision: In a 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court narrowed its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and it protections against illegal searches, allowing evidence that may have been obtained illegally to be used in court.

Click here to read a full analysis of the opinion and how it may lead to more illegal searches in the future.

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Check back here for additional coverage of new Supreme Court rulings. The final round of decisions is expected to be released on Monday, June 27.

Correction: a previous version of this article incorrectly stated the date when the next round of decisions are expected. It is Monday, June 27 not Monday, July 1.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Everything You Need to Know About the Recent Supreme Court Rulings appeared first on Law Street.

This post is part of Law Street’s continuing analysis of the recent Supreme Court rulings. To read the rest of the coverage click here.

Affirmative Action: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin

The decision: the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Texas at Austin can, legally, continue to factor race into admissions decisions.

This case has a lot of history

This isn’t exactly a new issue–or a new case. Affirmative action has been in and out of court for years and Abigail Fisher first brought this particular suit forward in 2012. It made its way up to the Supreme Court in 2013 only to be kicked back to lower courts.

It started back in 2008 when the University of Texas at Austin declined to admit Fisher into the school. Fisher then sued the university, claiming that UT denied her admission because she is Caucasian. Yes, you read that right. Fisher felt disadvantaged for being white.

How did that happen?

UT Austin, being the state’s flagship school, automatically accepts any applicant from a Texas public school who is in the top 10 percent of his or her graduating class. That batch of 90th percentile students makes up about 75 percent of UT’s incoming freshman class. For the last 25 percent, the university combines two scores to evaluate applicants.

Alongside SAT scores and high school grades, which make up an applicant’s Academic Index, students not automatically admitted are given a Personal Achievement Index (PAI). The PAI is UT’s way of giving people credit for non-academic factors like race, economic background, and life experience.

Check out this article: to read more about the case’s background.

So what does today’s ruling mean?

The 4-3 decision upholds the use of affirmative action, to an extent. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, in which he stated that admissions officers can’t run wild with affirmative action. He wrote:

“The Court’s affirmance of the University’s admissions policy today does not necessarily mean the University may rely on that same policy without refinement. It is the University’s ongoing obligation to engage in constant deliberation and continued reflection regarding its admissions policies”

You can put your fingers away, we did the math for you. Seven of the eight justices weighed in, while Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because she was involved as solicitor general.

You can read the opinion here.

Samantha Reilly

Samantha Reilly is an editorial intern at Law Street Media. A New Jersey native, she is pursuing a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. Contact Samantha at SReilly@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Supreme Court Upholds UT Austin’s Affirmative Action Program appeared first on Law Street.

As racial tensions become more visible in the United States, particularly at American universities, the Supreme Court finds itself hearing oral arguments on a major affirmative action case. While legal underpinning for affirmative action has been weakening in recent court decisions, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit seek to end the practice altogether.

The lawsuit, Fisher v. University of Texas, was brought by Abigail Fisher after she was denied acceptance to the University of Texas’ flagship school at Austin. Fisher alleges that while she was not accepted other, less-qualified students were admitted to the school because of their race. UT-Austin has a relatively unique admissions process because the school automatically accepts all students from Texas in the top 10 percent of their high school class. In practice, the actual percentage has been slightly lower since a law modified the rule in 2009, which said that UT-Austin must be able to fill 75 percent of the available residences with students from the top of their high school class. Importantly, though, Fisher was not granted automatic admission and was then forced to be considered using the university’s holistic evaluation process, in which race is considered alongside a wide range of factors.

Interestingly, the university’s 10 percent policy has actually helped increase diversity at UT-Austin. The policy leverages the fact that Texas high schools are often racially homogenous in order to promote diversity. Because many of the state’s high schools are primarily black or primarily white, the top 10 percent admissions policy ends up increasing the number of minority students accepted to the school.

What’s particularly interesting about this case is that there is little evidence to suggest Fisher would have been accepted even if race wasn’t a factor. Instead, the case is more accurately a challenge to the use of race in admissions itself and not a challenge of the school’s particular decision in Fisher’s case. Pro Publica’s candid analysis of the case states the subject of the case pretty clearly: it’s about the conservative view that the Constitution is colorblind and no one should be treated differently based on their race. On the other hand, proponents of affirmative action argue that it is necessary to combat the legacy of racism and inequality in the United States, and by many measures those resulting racial disparities still exist today.

That underlying debate is at the heart of the discussion around the case, and it becomes particularly clear you look at the facts. When Fisher applied to UT-Austin in 2008, the 10 percent rule accounted for about 92 percent of all incoming students from Texas. Although she had good grades Fisher did not meet that qualification. Instead, she was evaluated using the university’s holistic review process  using both an academic index (AI), which is based on test scores and grades, and a personal achievement index (PAI), which is based on two essays, the applicant’s life experiences, and, importantly, “special circumstances” that can range from economic background to race.

Based on the applicant pool, available evidence suggests that her rejection was not a result of her race. This fact is put clearly in the case’s court documents, in which UT-Austin notes,

Because petitioner [Fisher] was not in the top 10 percent of her high school class, her application was considered pursuant to the holistic review process described above… The summary judgment record is uncontradicted that—due to the stiff competition in 2008 and petitioner’s relatively low AI score—petitioner would not have been admitted to the Fall 2008 freshman class even if she had received ‘a “perfect” PAI score of 6.’

Put simply, regardless of Fisher’s score on the personal achievement index, her grades and test scores were too low to grant her admission–meaning that race had nothing to do with the school’s decision as the PAI wasn’t a factor. Fisher was also denied admission to the school’s summer program, but the evidence suggests that the same thing happened. For the summer program, there were better qualified black and white students who did not earn acceptance.

Rather than seeking to correct Fisher’s admissions decision, this case is, transparently, about eliminating affirmative action from the college admissions process. The group funding the lawsuit, the Project on Fair Representation, seeks to “support litigation that challenges racial and ethnic classifications and preferences in state and federal courts.” This ranges from ending affirmative action in admissions and employment to eliminating voting protections for minorities. And so far, the group has had some notable success achieving that goal. In fact, it was the force behind the Shelby County court case that invalidated a major part of the civil rights act a couple years ago.

In the last landmark ruling on affirmative action, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion that allowed schools to use race as a factor for admissions in order to achieve diversity but gave a sort of expiration date on the practice. According to the decision, affirmative action could be used if it was narrowly tailored to promote greater diversity among the student body. In the opinion, she said, “the court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That was 2003, but 12 years later a renewed push to end affirmative action may move that deadline up considerably.

The Supreme Court is now tasked with determining whether affirmative action remains acceptable or if it should be further restricted and possibly eliminated altogether. Notably, Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case because the Justice Department filed a brief on it during her time as Solicitor General. There is a possibility that the Justices split the decision 4-4, in which case the lower court’s ruling in support of the admissions program will hold.

It’s pretty clear that the Justices are not eager to hand down a landmark decision on affirmative action. In fact, they have already heard this case once before but remanded it back to the lower court to evaluate UT-Austin’s use of affirmative action with stricter scrutiny. In oral arguments earlier this week, some of the Justices wanted to stall even further, questioning whether sending it back for a trial could be beneficial. Now that race is at the forefront of political discussion, the court is in a particularly tricky position. The fate of affirmative action programs now hangs in the balance.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Affirmative Action Makes its Way Back to the Supreme Court appeared first on Law Street.

This week, the Supreme Court is dealing with the second case to challenge affirmative action in two years—Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. Last session, Fisher v. University of Texas made headlines when the Supreme Court did not decide on the merits of the case, but rather determined that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny that the precedents of Grutter v. Bollinger and Regents of the Univ of Cal. v. Bakke required. The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Fifth Circuit, and in doing so, chose not to take up the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions. Affirmative action remained constitutional.

This new case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action also deals with affirmative action, but from a completely different angle. In 2006, Michigan voters passed a ballot initiative that banned state-funded schools from using affirmative action policies. They argued that affirmative action policies are discriminatory because they treat people of different races differently, and that striking down such a policy removed that potential for discrimination. They are not the only state to make this choice—Washington, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, California, and Florida also ban racial preferences in admissions. The US Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit struck down this ballot initiative, basing their precedents on other cases in which changes to a political process were deemed discriminatory.

There are a few obvious questions that arise from this case. First, what effect has this ban on affirmative action yielded? Does the Supreme-Court-approved constitutionality of affirmative action make it an option or a requirement for states? And finally, what will the justices decide?

Let’s start with the easiest of those three questions: what effect can we see in Michigan from the affirmative action ban? The answer: African-American and Latino enrollment at the University of Michigan has dropped since the 2006 ban. But something significantly more interesting is occurring in some of the other states that have banned affirmative action. Richard D. Kahlenberg found that many of these states adopted race-neutral policies, such as banning legacies, admitting students at the top of their high school class all across a given state, and programs for better financial aid. These states with race neutral strategies had the same levels, or higher, of minority enrollment as they did before banning affirmative action. Proponents of these policies argue that we need to focus on differences in socioeconomic class disparity, not just race. They cite the fact that poor white students only score marginally better on SATs than poor minority students as proof.

Next, does the Supreme-Court-approved constitutionality of affirmative action make it an option or a requirement? There’s no easy answer to this question, because any argument becomes somewhat cyclical. In the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, also focused on Michigan, the Supreme Court stated that certain affirmative action policies that aimed to promote class diversity and evaluated numerous factors for every candidate were not unconstitutional as they did not take the form of a quota system outlawed by Regents of the Univ. of Cal. Vs. Bakke. However that does not mean that states must allow affirmative action, just that they may.

Affirmative action is a good thing. It allows greater opportunities, greater diversity, and helps thousands of students each year get into great schools where they are able to thrive. And we do know it is constitutional—the Supreme Court has affirmed as much. But will the Supreme Court strike down Michigan’s ban? Probably not. Despite recent liberal wins, this is still a conservative Court. The plaintiff, Attorney General of Michigan Bill Schuette is arguing that Michigan is being nondiscriminatory by banning policies that do not treat all races the same. The defense, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is proposing that affirmative action is a mechanism in which to further equal protection and equal treatment. For this court, particularly for constant swing justice Anthony Kennedy, that argument probably won’t hold up.

There’s more work to be done in ensuring that every child, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, or any other criteria that has been marginalized in our society can receive the higher education that they deserve. Whether it is accomplished through affirmative action, race-neutral policies, or something else entirely, that is a laudable goal that will take time and effort, but will ultimately benefit us all.

[Slate]

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Featured image courtesy of [Adam Fagen via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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