Unfinished Business: Supreme Court Expected to Announce Decisions on Major Civil Rights Cases This Week

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The Supreme Court is expected to end their work year this week, yet they have yet to announce decisions on three major civil rights related cases that they heard in that time. Including a case by a former Sugar Land student suing over the University of Texas Affirmative Action policies.

Houstonians Weigh In On Supreme Court Case Fisher v. UT
(KUHF Public Radio)

Adam Liptak, New York Times
WASHINGTON – Within days, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a series of decisions that could transform three fundamental social institutions: marriage, education and voting.

The extraordinary run of blockbuster rulings expected in the space of a single week also will reshape the meaning of legal equality and help define for decades to come one of the Constitution’s grandest commands: “the equal protection of the laws.”

If those words require only equal treatment from the government, the rulings are likely to be a mixed bag that will delight and disappoint liberals and conservatives in equal measure. Under that approach, same-sex couples who want to marry will be better off at the end of the term, while blacks and Hispanics may find it harder to get into college and to vote.

But a tension runs through the cases, one based on different conceptions of equality. Some justices are committed to formal equality. Others say the Constitution requires a more dynamic kind of equality, one that takes account of the weight of history and of modern disparities.

The four major cases yet to be decided concern same-sex marriage, affirmative action in higher education and the fate of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which places special burdens on states with a history of racial discrimination.

Formal equality would require that gay couples be treated just like straight couples when it comes to marriage, white students just like black students when it comes to admissions decisions and Southern states just like Northern ones when it comes to federal oversight of voting. The effect would be to help gay couples, and hurt blacks and Latinos.

But such rulings are hard to reconcile with the historical meaning of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, adopted after the Civil War and meant to protect newly freed black slaves. It would be odd, said David Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago, for that amendment to helps gays but not blacks.

“What’s weird about it would be the retreat on race, which is the paradigm example of what the 14th Amendment is meant to deal with,” he said, “coupled with fairly aggressive action on sexual orientation.” […]
(Read this full story at the New York Times)

RELATED STORIES:
• The origins of affirmative action (The Week)
• Supreme Court yet to rule on major affirmative action challenge (The Hill)
• Do We Really Understand Affirmative Action? (The Root)
• Odds Are Kennedy Will Decide Affirmative Action Case. But What Will He Decide? (Forbes)
• Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More Than Anyone (Time)
• Why America Still Needs Affirmative Action (New Yorker)

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