UCLA Medical School and Racial Bias
Racial preferences in university admissions ended in 2023, or did they? A lawsuit in federal court against the University of California Geffen Medical School is worth watching as an example of how schools are complying with the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Late last week the groups Students for Fair Admissions and Do No Harm sued UCLA Geffen for bias in admissions. The class-action lawsuit, which is brought on behalf of students denied admission since 2020, says UCLA used different academic standards for applicants of different races to achieve racially balanced student classes.
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Vox
7 minutes ago
- Vox
The Supreme Court's blessedly narrow decision about religion in the workplace, explained
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. In 2018, shortly before Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation shifted the Supreme Court drastically to the right, Democratic Justice Elena Kagan laid out her strategy to keep her Court from becoming too ideological or too partisan. The secret, she said, is to take 'big questions and make them small.' Since then, Kagan and her Democratic colleagues have had mixed success persuading their colleagues to decide cases narrowly when they could hand right-wing litigants a sweeping victory. The Court has largely transformed its approach to religion, for example, though it does occasionally hand down religion cases that end less with a bang than with a whimper. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission will likely be remembered as such a whimper. The opinion is unanimous, and it is authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of Kagan's few fellow Democratic justices. The case could have ended in a sweeping decision that severely undermined the rights of many workers. Instead, Sotomayor's opinion focuses on a very narrow distinction between how Wisconsin law treats some religious groups as compared to others. Catholic Charities involved a Wisconsin law that exempts some nonprofits from paying unemployment taxes. This exemption applies only to employers that operate 'primarily for religious purposes.' Wisconsin's state supreme court determined that a 'religious purpose' includes activities like holding worship services or providing religious education, but it does not include secular services like feeding the poor, even if those secular activities are motivated by religion. Related The Supreme Court is leading a Christian conservative revolution The upshot is that Catholic Charities — an organization that is run by the Catholic Church but focuses primarily on secular charitable work — was not exempt from paying unemployment taxes. Sotomayor's decision reverses the state supreme court, so Catholic Charities will now receive an exemption. The Court largely avoids a fight over when businesses with a religious identity can ignore the law In a previous era, the Court was very cautious about permitting religious organizations to claim exemptions, in part because doing so would give some businesses 'an advantage over their competitors.' Such exemptions could also potentially permit employers with a religious identity to exploit their workers. In Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), for example, the Court considered a religious cult that operated a wide range of commercial businesses. These businesses paid no cash salaries or wages, although they did claim to give workers food, clothing, and shelter. The cult sought an exemption from minimum wage laws and similar workplace protections, but the Court disagreed. A too-broad decision in Catholic Charities could have potentially undermined decisions like Alamo Foundation, by giving some employers a broad right to ignore laws protecting their workers. But Sotomayor's opinion reads like it was crafted to hand Catholic Charities the narrowest possible victory. Under the state supreme court's decision in Catholic Charities, Sotomayor writes, a church-run nonprofit that does entirely secular charity work may not receive an exemption from paying unemployment taxes. But a virtually identical nonprofit that does the exact same work but also engages in 'proselytization' or limits its services to members of the same faith would receive an exemption. This distinction, Sotomayor says, violates the Supreme Court's long-standing rule that the government 'may not 'officially prefe[r]' one religious denomination over another.' The state may potentially require all charities to pay unemployment taxes. But it cannot treat religious charities that seek to convert people, or that limit their services to members of one faith, differently from religious charities that do not do this. In Sotomayor's words, an organization's 'eligibility for the exemption ultimately turns on inherently religious choices (namely, whether to proselytize or serve only co-religionists).' The crux of Sotomayor's opinion is that the decision whether to try to convert people, or whether to serve non-Catholics, is an inherently 'theological' choice. And states cannot treat different religious organizations differently because of their theological choices. Unfortunately, Sotomayor's opinion, which is a brief 15 pages, does not really define the term 'theological.' So it is likely that future courts will have to wrestle with whether other laws that treat some organizations differently do so because of theological differences or for some other reason. It's not hard to imagine a cult like the one in Alamo Foundation claiming that it has a theological objection to paying the minimum wage. But the Catholic Charities opinion also does not explicitly undermine decisions like Alamo Foundation. Nor does it embrace a more sweeping approach proposed by dissenting justices in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who argued that nonprofits whose 'motivations are religious' may claim an exemption — regardless of what that nonprofit actually does.
Fox News
10 minutes ago
- Fox News
Ex-Biden adviser calls Jean-Pierre ‘kinda dumb,' deletes tweet, says she's not a ‘genius-level Black woman'
As criticism mounts from within Biden's world against former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and her new book, one ex-aide lambasted the now-Independent ombudswoman as "kinda dumb" — a tweet he deleted but later stood by. Timothy Wu, now a Columbia Law professor, was former President Joe Biden's "architect" of antitrust policy whose faculty bio claims he also coined the progressive term "net neutrality" in 2002. In a now-deleted tweet, Wu wrote: "from a [White House] staff perspective, the real problem with Karine Jean-Pierre was that she was kinda dumb." "[She had n]o interest in understanding harder topics. Just gave random incoherent answers on policy," Wu added in the trashed tweet. The X account "I work with my word" replied to the original tweet, calling it "pretty racist," and the tweet was later deleted, but the reply remained. Below the reply, Wu added a new line of commentary, saying the Biden White House was "full of genius-level Black women. [Jean-Pierre] was not one of them." In response to another X user asking Wu whether Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt understands executive policy, the professor said a good ombudsperson will "meet with policy staff and try and understand what the administration is doing and why." Fox News Digital reached out to Wu via his Columbia faculty office, where he has taught since 2006. The former Biden adviser was also a Democratic primary candidate for New York's lieutenant governorship in 2014, and also worked in the Obama administration and at the Federal Trade Commission. Jean-Pierre announced Wednesday that she left the Democratic Party and has become an Independent while revealing her upcoming book: "Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines." She was mocked and criticized by several people in Biden's orbit besides Wu, including one who said, "I wouldn't ignore what Karine has to say, but it's not an account in which much weight will be invested — just like her briefings." "At noon on that day [that Biden left office], I became a private citizen who, like all Americans and many of our allies around the world, had to contend with what was to come next for our country. I determined that the danger we face as a country requires freeing ourselves of boxes. We need to be willing to exercise the ability to think creatively and plan strategically," Jean-Pierre said of her new Independent streak.
Wall Street Journal
13 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Proof' Review: Finding Truth in Numbers
Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence read: 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable . . . ' It was supposedly Benjamin Franklin who suggested instead announcing the truths to be 'self-evident,' as though they were fundamental mathematical axioms providing an incontestable foundation for the new republic. The idea of self-evident truths goes all the way back to Euclid's 'Elements' (ca. 300 B.C.), which depends on a handful of axioms—things that must be granted true at the outset, such as that one can draw a straight line between any two points on a plane. From such assumptions Euclid went on to show, for example, that there are infinitely many prime numbers, and that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal. If the axioms are true, and the subsequent reasoning is sound, then the conclusion is irrefutable. What we now have is a proof: something we can know for sure. Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof. Today, for example, we have computerized proofs by exhaustion, in which machines chew through examples so numerous that they could never be checked by humans. The author sketches the development of ever-more-rarefied mathematics, from calculus to the mind-bending work on different kinds of infinity by the Russian-German sage Georg Cantor, who proved that natural integers (1,2,3 . . . ) are somehow not more numerous than even numbers (2,4,6 . . .), even though the former set includes all the elements of the latter set, in addition to the one that contains all odd numbers. My favorite example is the Banach-Tarski paradox, which proves that you can disassemble a single sphere and reconstitute it into two spheres of identical size. Climbing the ladder of proof, we can enter a wild realm where intuitions break down completely. But proof, strictly understood, is only half the story here. Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Kucharski relates, taught himself to derive Euclid's proofs to give himself an argumentative edge in the courtroom and in Congress. Yet politics is messier than geometry; and so the dream of perfectly logical policymaking, immune to quibble, remains out of reach. What should we do, then, when a mathematical proof of truth is unavailable, but we must nonetheless act?
