WHAT WE'RE READING
The morning read for Wednesday, May 31
By SCOTUSblog
on May 31, 2023 at 10:32 am

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles, commentary, and other noteworthy links related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Wednesday morning read:

• US Supreme Court spurns ex-Shkreli lawyer Greebel’s challenge to prosecutors (Mike Scarcella, Reuters)
• What the Supreme Court’s ruling means for the future of wetlands (Lyric Aquino, Grist)
• Elite High School’s Admissions Plan May Face Supreme Court Test (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)
• The Urgent Warning That Got Cut From a Supreme Court Opinion 20 Years Ago (Richard L. Hasen, Slate)
• The Supreme Court was enabling corruption well before the Clarence Thomas scandal (Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, The Los Angeles Times)

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Recommended Citation: SCOTUSblog , The morning read for Wednesday, May 31, SCOTUSblog (May. 31, 2023, 10:32 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/the-morning-read-for-wednesday-may-31/

SIDEBAR

Elite High School’s Admissions Plan May Face Supreme Court Test

The justices will soon rule on race-conscious admissions plans at Harvard and U.N.C. A new appeals court case asks whether schools can use race-neutral tools to achieve racial diversity.

By Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington

May 29, 2023

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is very likely to forbid colleges and universities to use race as a factor in admissions decisions. Indeed, when the cases challenging the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were argued in October, some justices were already looking at the next question on the horizon: whether admissions officers may promote racial diversity by using race-neutral criteria.

“Your position,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told a lawyer for the challengers, “will put a lot of pressure going forward, if it’s accepted, on what qualifies as race neutral in the first place.” ... That question grew more concrete last week, when a divided three-judge panel of a federal appeals court allowed an elite public high school in Alexandria, Va., to revise its admissions policy by, among other things, eliminating standardized tests and setting aside spots for the top students at every public middle school in the area.

Those changes produced a class with more Black and Hispanic students and many fewer Asian American ones. In a dissent from last week’s decision that seemed to be addressed to the Supreme Court, Judge Allison J. Rushing wrote that the majority had refused “to look past the policy’s neutral varnish” and consider instead “an undisputed racial motivation and an undeniable racial result.”

It is a decent bet that the Supreme Court will agree to hear an appeal in that case and use it to answer questions left open in its coming decisions on the admissions practices of Harvard and U.N.C. ... Those universities take account of race as such. The high school does not. ... Indeed, admissions officers at the school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., are not told the race, sex or name of any applicant.

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Race, Admissions and the Supreme Court

Conservatives Open New Front in Elite School Admission Wars
Feb. 16, 2022

High School Did Not Discriminate Against Asian American Students, Court Rules
May 23, 2023

Supreme Court Allows Elite High School’s New Admissions Rules
April 25, 2022

Judge Strikes Down Elite Virginia High School’s Admissions Rules
Feb. 25, 2022

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. @adamliptak • Facebook