Yale Law v. the Law

The faculty of Yale Law School seems to be in a pickle. The university itself is moving toward a settlement with America regarding claims of discrimination against whites and Asians in Yale’s schools’ admissions procedures. That breaches the Supreme Court precedent against factoring race in admissions. Yet the faculty of Yale Law itself is balking, trying to stop a settlement or be excluded from one.Law professors at Yale, along with Dean Cristina Rodríguez, “have quietly lobbied top Yale leaders” against settling, the Times reports, in part because they reckon it “would threaten the rule of law and the university’s reputation.” The law school is, per the Times, even looking to “be excluded from any settlement with the federal government.” This disregard for the authority the Constitution vests in the Supreme Court is troubling coming from scholars purporting to educate the nation’s future legal elite.The context for the settlement talks is the finding by the Justice Department that Yale’s medical school has been “intentionally” choosing candidates for admission “based on their race.” As these columns summed it up: “In other words — flouting the law.” DOJ put forward, too, what it called “statistical evidence of intentional discrimination” showing that the school was breaching Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Supreme Court precedent.In the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling in 2023, the high court held that race-conscious admissions programs amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. Yet elite schools have been flouting the spirit of the precedent in an effort to maintain their de facto affirmative action admissions regimes. The DOJ marshaled evidence showing how this discrimination plays out at Yale’s medical school.Over the past several years at the Yale School of Medicine, the Wall Street Journal reports, Medical College Admission Test scores have consistently varied among different racial groups. DOJ data disclosed that MCAT scores for admitted black applicants ranged in the 94th or 95th percentile. Hispanic students’ scores tended to fall in the 95th or 96th percentile. Meanwhile, “white and Asian students scored in the 99th or 100th percentile,” per the Journal.The DOJ investigation into Yale’s undergraduate and law school admissions process is reportedly still active. If these schools’ procedures reflect the pattern set by the medical school, that would suggest a failure to adhere to the law of the land when it comes to race-based discrimination. Yet the law school’s faculty sounds unrepentant on this head. Feature the arguments by a Yale law professor, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, writing in Bloomberg Law. President Trump’s effort to make sure that schools are following the Constitution and high court precedent, Ms. Kohler-Hausmann writes, “rests on invented law and distorted statistics.” In her telling, the Students for Fair Admission ruling does not bar “every consideration of race.” She suggests that the court’s ruling “distinguished categorical racial preferences, which it banned, from contextual uses of race, which it allowed.”Contrast that with Chief Justice Roberts’s conclusion in Students for Fair Admissions. An applicant to an institution of higher learning, he wrote, “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.” Leftist academics appear unwilling to grasp this point. Ms. Kohler-Hausmann laments that Yale is weighing a “settlement induced by executive pressure, rather than public legal reasoning.”Ms. Kohler-Hausmann, along with others on the Yale Law faculty, seems to be proposing a course of defiance akin to that of Southern segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education. She reckons that settlements like the one being negotiated between the DOJ and Yale “help manufacture a constitutional rule.” It is difficult to understand how a legal scholar could be advocating such a traversal of the “supreme Law of the Land.”

Yale Law v. the Law

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