Author: Pema Levy

Affirmative Action May Be Dead—But the Battle over Race and Admissions Is Just Getting Started

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, often ranked as the country’s top public high school, lies across the Potomac River from Washington in Alexandria, Virginia. For years, the magnet school’s student body has been majority Asian American, with paltry numbers of Black and Latino students. While the situation at TJ irked the county school board […]

Affirmative Action May Be Dead—But the Battle Over Race and Admissions Is Just Getting Started

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, often ranked as the country’s top public high school, lies across the Potomac River from Washington in Alexandria, Virginia. For years, the magnet school’s student body has been majority Asian American, with paltry numbers of Black and Latino students. While the situation at TJ irked the county school board […]

The Supreme Court Allows Discrimination Against LGBTQ People

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed certain businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people, creating a large loophole in federal and state civil rights laws that have protected Americans for decades. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the opinion for the court’s conservative justices, who made up the 6 vote majority. The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented. The […]

Did Justice Jackson Sneak a Loophole into the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ban?

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority banned race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities on Thursday, ruling that using race as an admissions factor violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The decision invalidates the University of North Carolina and Harvard’s systems for making up their student body, and will, more broadly, make higher education whiter and […]

Supreme Court Strikes Down Universities’ Affirmative Action Programs

The Supreme Court ruled today in a 6-3 decision that the use of race in college admissions violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus is unconstitutional, dealing a serious blow to affirmative action measures used by colleges to create diverse student bodies and remedy past discrimination against minorities.  “Many universities have […]

What the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act Opinion Means for 2024—and Beyond

The Supreme Court’s surprise ruling upholding the use of the Voting Rights Act in cases challenging political maps is likely to affect the 2024 elections and beyond—though how big the impact will be depends on how quickly courts across the country move in multiple cases challenging racial gerrymandering schemes. Thursday’s opinion in Allen v. Milligan came out […]