Monday’s Ricci ruling has been hailed and scorned throughout the press this week. Many of the articles have focused on the fact that a 3-member appellate panel which included Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had been overturned.
One of the best articles I’ve read on the topic, though, comes from Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times. Greenhouse, a former SCOTUS correspondent who now teaches at Yale Law School, says the lower courts relied on prior rulings but that this ruling changed the game:
…where the lower courts saw a safe harbor, the Supreme Court majority saw “express, race-based decision-making” that violated Title VII’s other prong, the prohibition against disparate treatment. A “statistical disparity based on race,” the standard that Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues used, is no longer a sufficient excuse, Justice Kennedy said.
What I see here is judicial activism. The lower courts relied on precedent while the slim majority of Supremes didn’t.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 reversal of a decision endorsed by a three-judge appellate panel that included Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor must remind all of us that racism can influence the judgment of our judges when they harbor racist tendencies of their own.
When is it ever correct to promote based upon skin color and a lower qualification assessment?
The answer should be self evident.
All of us should distance ourselves from this form of “equality” where value, pride and honor gained by the pursuit of excellence diminished when pushed to the margins and replaced by a racially inspired system based upon quotas.
Affirmative action is not good for anyone. It is certainly not good for America.
Before commenting, did you bother to read the article? Hint: it wasn’t about affirmative action.
Title VII specifically states:
If the city of New Haven feared a lawsuit because no Blacks passed the test, then that fear was based on prior judicial activism, not the law as it is written.
The Ricci decision corrects that situation.
I do agree that the lower court made the correct decision, because the lower courts are bound by prior Supreme Court decisions. However, because the prior Supreme Court decision was wrong, the decision to overturn was also correct.
Oh, here’s the link to the law:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/2000e-2.html
I think that all the bleating currently going on about judicial activism is mostly silly. It seems to me that it’s an “eye of the beholder” sort of thing. Not surprisingly most of us see it decisions that we don’t like.
Forcing a political entity to strictly adhere to the letter of the law seems pretty low on the judicial activism scale to me. It’s not as though the Court created a new right while striking down a law and then later used that new right to fashion yet another one as it struck down yet another law.
And to do so, twisting simple words like “regulate” from is normal meaning, “to make regular,” into something unrecognizable, as in, “to have absolute power over any little thing even remotely connected to the subject at hand.”