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On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation recognizing a new national holiday, Martin Luther King Day, which is celebrated on the third Monday in January. It has been almost two decades since then, and almost five decades since Dr. King invited the people of this nation to seek a higher moral ideal than the pe ...

Bloomberg today reports that the Office for Civil Rights, a subdivision of the U.S. Education Department, is investigating complaints that both Harvard and Princeton discriminate against Asian-American undergraduate admission applicants. The article states: Like Jews in the first half of the 20th century, who faced quotas at Harvard, Princeton, an ...

Yesterday several of my colleagues and I attended a debate at the King School of Law at UC Davis, hosted by the Federalist Society, on the role of race preferences in education.  Taking the anti-preference side of the debate was Ward Connerly, former UC Regent, a prominent advocate for ending all government race preferences, and … ...

As a University of Wisconsin alum, I am the first to point out that the Gophers have lost the Battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe 8 times in a row, or that their basketball team hasn’t had a winning record in the Big Ten since 2005.  But, my criticism of this editorial in the Minnesota Daily does not stem from … ...

Last month the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin filed an important lawsuit against the city of Milwaukee over the City’s new public contracting program.  In short, the City’s program, spelled out in City Ordinance 370, violates the Equal Protection Clause by requiring contracting officials and prime contractors to discriminat ...

The Weekly Standard ran an article this week on the twenty or so briefs that were filed on behalf of Abigail Fisher in her challenge to the University of Texas’s race-based admissions policy.  The article finds PLF’s brief, which was joined by the Center for Equal Opportunity, American Civil Rights Institute, National Association of Sc ...

As part of our continuining Fisher v. University of Texas oral argument coverage, I want to talk about a point pressed by the University in defense of its racial preference: proportional representation.   It has been well-reported that Texas had, through the Top Ten Percent Law, dramatically increased the raw number of under-represented minoriti ...

In my last post about our case Associated General Contractors of America, San Diego Chapter  v. California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), I described how Caltrans implements the federal Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program in a way that requires prime contractors to discriminate against subcontractors on the basis of race and ...

Is race a qualification for contractors in California?  Last November, the United States Department of Transportation approved the policy of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) that 9.5% of the federal funds the state receives for transportation projects will go to subcontractors of preferred races.  The policy is contained in ...