The Corner

Law & the Courts

Just How Bad Was the Dissent in SFFA v. Harvard?

From left to right: Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, and Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Last week, the Supreme Court declared in a 6–3 ruling that the racial-preference programs that nearly all selective colleges and universities use to achieve student-body “diversity” violate the 14th Amendment.

As expected, that holding didn’t go down well with the Court’s “progressives” — Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. They dissented in shrill tones. But it wasn’t just the shrillness that was notable, but the way the dissenters tried to make their case for keeping racial preferences. They didn’t offer much of a legal argument at all, but rather wrote something more like a paper for a undergrad political-science or sociology class.

In this Liberty Unyielding post, Hans Bader takes a look at the dissent.

He writes:

In their dissent, the three progressive justices made false claims about health disparities between blacks and whites, inaccurately claiming that black babies are much less likely to survive with a white physician (a claim debunked in the National ReviewDaily Signal, and other sources), and falsely implying that racial minorities in general have shorter life spans than whites (in fact, Hispanics and Asians typically live longer than whites).

Oh, but what are mere facts when you’re preaching for “social justice”?

George Leef is the the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He is the author of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time.
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