Under affirmativeaction, Jewish students lost most
When trying to gauge the future impact of Supreme Court decisions, sometimes it’s wiser to look at what the justices didn’t say rather than what they did say.
Many religious rights groups hailed last week’s unanimous decision in the case of a Christian postal worker as a landmark ruling in favor of employees seeking accommodation of their religious beliefs in the workplace. The worker, Gerald Groff, had sued USPS, claiming it had failed to prove that his request for Sundays off would be costly to it, or inconvenient to the USPS or to his colleagues.
However, the Supreme Court merely returned the case to a US District Court for further consideration under a new standard that will now require an employer to demonstrate that granting the employee’s request would cause them “substantial hardship.” Under the previous standard, all an employer had to prove was that the extra costs would be de minimis, or minor. The Court declined Groff’s request to overturn a 1977 decision in TWA vs. Hardison that upheld the now defunct airline’s right to fire an employee — a Seventh-day Adventist — who refused to work on Saturdays. The final word has yet to be spoken on this issue.
In what might end up as a more historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited if not effectively ended the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The Court voted 6-3 that admissions programs at Harvard and University of North Carolina violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not based on race.”
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