What I'm reading: Lawsuits and court rulings

Affirmative action, public records, Iowa's mask mandate, and more

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

Hello to all, and welcome to new subscribers! I’ve been a bit less active over here lately, as I’m under the gun to finish a bunch of projects at Bleeding Heartland before the election. (To make sure you don’t miss those posts, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my other email newsletter, which features links to all recent articles and commentaries.)

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight some good court reporting I read this week.

Speaking of the judiciary, many readers have asked about the judges who are up for retention in Iowa this year. The Iowa State Bar Association published results from its survey of attorneys who have appeared before the judges at all levels. I wrote a deep dive on how Iowa Supreme Court Justices Matthew McDermott and Dana Oxley have decided important cases related to abortion rights, election law, the environment, LGBTQ equality, criminal justice, and more.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on two cases that will likely bring about the end of affirmative action. Mark Joseph Stern posted some audio clips from the proceedings, where Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan were on fire (listen here, here, here, here, or here). By all accounts, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was outstanding. At one point, she highlighted how men are overrepresented among the attorneys who appear before the Supreme Court, saying the "gross disparity" could signal to women that becoming a Supreme Court litigator is not "a path that's open to me."

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern summed up the arguments well in this article for Slate. Excerpt:

What was perhaps most remarkable in these largely predictable arguments was how much time the conservative justices devoted to pure policy arguments. These justices dislike affirmative action for a whole lot of deep emotional reasons that, it turns out, have nothing to do with the Constitution. They barely even considered the meaning of the 14th Amendment until Justice Elena Kagan finally brought it to their attention two and a half hours into the UNC arguments. Kagan, along with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, was vastly more interested in the history of the Constitution’s equal protection clause than their ostensibly originalist colleagues. If and when the supermajority does eradicate race-conscious admissions, everyone will be able to weigh the strength of their arguments. But no one should pretend the decision was remotely rooted in actual law.

One of the lawsuits is challenging Harvard University’s admissions policy, which considers race among many other factors. Although the plaintiffs claim affirmative action on behalf of some students of color causes discrimination against Asian-American applicants, the really unfair preferences go to athletes, legacies (children of alumni), and children of large donors or staff. Aaron Mak reported in 2019,

ALDCs make up only 5 percent of [Harvard] applicants but 30 percent of the admitted class. They enjoy an admission rate of about 45 percent, as opposed to the normal rate of 4.5 to 5 percent, and account for more than 40 percent of the white student population. These preferences benefit white and wealthy applicants over people of other races but especially over Asian Americans, who are the least likely to be ALDCs. […]

Athletes and legacies make up most of the ALDCs who are admitted, and research indicates that advantages for these two groups have actually been increasing over time. Legacy admits get in at a rate five times that of nonlegacies. From 2010 to 2015, legacies accounted for more than 20 percent of the white student population at Harvard, compared with 7 percent of the Latino population, 6.6 percent of the Asian American population, and 4.8 percent of the African American population. Favoring the children of predominantly wealthy alumni serves to entrench racial and economic privilege at the university, and proponents of diversity should call on Harvard to end the practice.

In other court news, William Morris reported for the Des Moines Register on an activist’s lawsuit against the city of Des Moines, which refused to release individual use-of-force incident reports from the police department.

Morris also covered the ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pratt, who determined this week that under federal disabilities law, “Iowa school districts must consider medically sensitive students' requests to require mask wearing of those around them, notwithstanding a state law that banned school mask mandates.” The state has said it will appeal the decision.

Last week, Polk County District Court Judge Celene Gogerty heard arguments in the state’s effort to reinstate Iowa’s 2018 abortion ban. (Here’s background on the state’s legal arguments and those offered by the ACLU of Iowa on behalf of Planned Parenthood.) Jared Strong covered the hearing for Iowa Capital Dispatch. I live-tweeted the hearing; for those interested in the play by play, my Twitter thread starts here.

There is no firm deadline for Judge Gogerty to issue her ruling, but that often happens within 60 to 90 days. The losing side is likely to appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, which could hear the case sometime next year.

Thanks for reading! I will write more regularly on this Substack after the election. Since I don’t duplicate most Bleeding Heartland posts here, check out the website or the Evening Heartland newsletter for recent election coverage and commentary.