Perhaps the biggest problem in current civil-rights law is the “disparate impact” rule — the policy that, if group X is underrepresented among a company’s new hires, the burden of proof rests on the employer to disprove discrimination in its hiring process. This flies in the face of an entire human history in which groups have shown varying abilities for and interest in different pursuits. Underrepresentation does almost nothing, in and of itself, to evidence discrimination.

In 1974, as a Princeton student, current Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor took up the “disparity equals discrimination” line. Here’s a letter to the editor she wrote:

On April 18, 1974, the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton filed a complaint . . . charging the university with an institutional pattern of discrimination.
The facts of the complaint are these: 1) There is not one Puerto Rican or Chicano administrator or faculty member in the university; 2) There are two million Puerto Ricans in the United States and two and a half million more on the island itself. Yet there were only 66 Puerto Rican applicants this year, and only 31 Puerto Rican stuents on campus. While there are 12 million Chicanos in the United States, there were only 111 Chicano applicants and 27 students on campus this year; 3) Not one permanent course in this university now deals in any notable detail with the Puerto Rican or Chicano cultures.
Self-evident lack of commitment
The lack of commitment on the part of the university to the Puerto Rican or Chicano heritage seems self-evident from these facts. Yet statistical evidence is not the total concern or complaint of the Puerto Rican or Chicano students — what is terrifying to us are the implications. The facts imply and reflect the total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture. In effect, they reflect an attempt — a successful attempt so far — to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.

There is no “statistical evidence” here, and the “implications” do not follow from the numbers she presented.

Is there any evidence that she’s figured this out in the intervening years?