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SCOTUS decisions

Deacon923 said:
Meh. I think our justice system, at the trial level, could be greatly improved by giving the judges more independent investigative power in certain types of cases instead of having them just act as theoretically impartial referees. It would also help if we actually funded our court system at a level commensurate with its status as the third coequal branch of government. Instead what we get is endless procedural delaying tactics, scorched earth litigation tactics, and a criminal justice system where the wealthy pay for leniency and the poor get hammered because the adversarial system only works if both sides can afford a quality advocate.
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I'm as cynical as anyone, but maybe you haven't been before a lot of judges? I definitely don't want them acting as investigators. That is also completely impractical--unless you want to turn the judiciary into a quasi-executive branch. I think we know that ends up. As far as the inherent unfairness of a system where wealthy people have access to superior service--can you name any societal sphere where that is not the case?
 
Simos coming out of nowhere to be a hard core conservative has been a fun trend over the past couple weeks.
 
WFFaithful said:
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Get that AA doesn't apply to private schools, but Ben Carson says a lot of alarming things for a Yale and Michigan grad. Michigan Med School certainly has higher admissions standards than UT undergrad. Still seems like a bizarre case: woman wasn't in the top 10% of her class and graduated from LSU. Certainly wasn't denied a college education and would have been admitted to UT had she been in the top 10%. There are less than a dozen states with competitive admissions standards for public universities. Not everyone with a 4.0/1600 SATs gets into their absolute first choice, but they'll still be admitted to multiple excellent public and private schools.
 
FuckmouthedRube said:
Get that AA doesn't apply to private schools, but Ben Carson says a lot of alarming things for a Yale and Michigan grad. Michigan Med School certainly has higher admissions standards than UT undergrad. Still seems like a bizarre case: woman wasn't in the top 10% of her class and graduated from LSU. Certainly wasn't denied a college education and would have been admitted to UT had she been in the top 10%. There are less than a dozen states with competitive admissions standards for public universities. Not everyone with a 4.0/1600 SATs gets into their absolute first choice, but they'll still be admitted to multiple excellent public and private schools.
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Not only that but she had the opportunity to go to another state school and transfer into UT-Austin and graduate from there and she turned it down. Not sure if she tried to transfer from LSU to UT-Austin or not.

It's the ultimate millennial entitlement. She was a marginal candidate who didn't get into the college of her choice and she literally made a federal case out of it.
 
The facts that:

1. The courts accepted her standing argument

2. Texas didn't just moot the case by giving her $150 (granted it probably just figured there would be another case coming)

are completely ridiculous
 
PhDeac said:
Not only that but she had the opportunity to go to another state school and transfer into UT-Austin and graduate from there and she turned it down. Not sure if she tried to transfer from LSU to UT-Austin or not.

It's the ultimate millennial entitlement. She was a marginal candidate who didn't get into the college of her choice and she literally made a federal case out of it.
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This, but I can't wait to watch the conservatrolls defend!
 
MysteryMen said:
What brief was he quoting exactly? Pretty positive it wasn't the petitioners
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line 15-16 he says he's citing the brief. I'm certainly not one to defend Scalia but posing rather extreme questions to flesh out one side's argument is pretty common for appellate justices. He's probably going to write some jiggery-pokery (hopefully in a dissent) when this case comes out which will be worth the WTF reaction, but it's a little ridiculous to give him shit for an excerpt of a question.
 
RChildress107 said:
line 15-16 he says he's citing the brief. I'm certainly not one to defend Scalia but posing rather extreme questions to flesh out one side's argument is pretty common for appellate justices. He's probably going to write some jiggery-pokery (hopefully in a dissent) when this case comes out which will be worth the WTF reaction, but it's a little ridiculous to give him shit for an excerpt of a question.
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It seems to me that what he says before he cites the brief and what he says the brief says are definitely not the same thing.

Big difference between saying it's better for blacks to go to worse schools and saying that a study found that black scientists didn't go to the best schools
 
Junebug said:
Help me understand what you are saying here.
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-Private universities can set their own admissions standards and use race as a criteria without being subject to legal challenges. Public universities, not so much. None of the AA cases have involved private universities.
-Icky prison sex proves sexuality is a choice, Obamacare is the worst thing to happen to America since slavery, and the pyramids were built to store grain seem more than a little bit out there. Doesn't mean that Carson's a crappy surgeon, but does seem surprising coming from a Yale and Michigan grad.
-Being admitted to an excellent public medical school is more difficult than being admitted to an excellent undergraduate public university.
 
Junebug said:
So people shouldn't sue for violations of the equal protection clause when they've been discriminated against on the basis of race? I'll keep that in mind.
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So people who don't get a position because due to lack of qualifications should cry racism? I'll keep that in mind.

http://www.propublica.org/article/a...-abigail-fishers-affirmative-action-case-is-r

Even among those students, Fisher did not particularly stand out. Court records show her grade point average (3.59) and SAT scores (1180 out of 1600) were good but not great for the highly selective flagship university. The school's rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard.

As a result, university officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.

It's true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.
 
Deacon923 said:
Meh. I think our justice system, at the trial level, could be greatly improved by giving the judges more independent investigative power in certain types of cases instead of having them just act as theoretically impartial referees. It would also help if we actually funded our court system at a level commensurate with its status as the third coequal branch of government. Instead what we get is endless procedural delaying tactics, scorched earth litigation tactics, and a criminal justice system where the wealthy pay for leniency and the poor get hammered because the adversarial system only works if both sides can afford a quality advocate.
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I don't understand how in one sentence you want judges to have more power, and in another decry the criminal justice system and how the poor get "hammered."

I can pretty much guarantee that giving judges more power in criminal cases would only lead to a greater percentage of poor people and minorities getting screwed.
 
Junebug said:
So people shouldn't sue for violations of the equal protection clause when they've been discriminated against on the basis of race? I'll keep that in mind.
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In the context of the equal protection clause this isn't discrimination. You shouldn't be able to sue just because the government decides to take away a privilege that only a certain group of people have because they happened to be born white.

If we are going to apply the narrowest context possible and call this discrimination I think the state has a strong argument that its interest is compelling enough to overcome strict scrutiny
 
MysteryMen said:
It seems to me that what he says before he cites the brief and what he says the brief says are definitely not the same thing.

Big difference between saying it's better for blacks to go to worse schools and saying that a study found that black scientists didn't go to the best schools
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Agreed. My point still stands that these types of questions are common and don't always dictate how a justice is going to decide (or what basis they will decide on). Picking out certain questions and dumping them into the 24-hour news cycle is borderline irresponsible.

Scalia's written decisions leave plenty of room for attack, this just seems much ado about nothing.
 
Les Grossman said:
I don't understand how in one sentence you want judges to have more power, and in another decry the criminal justice system and how the poor get "hammered."

I can pretty much guarantee that giving judges more power in criminal cases would only lead to a greater percentage of poor people and minorities getting screwed.
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that assumes that under a better system, the same people, with the same training and the same qualifications, would still be judges.

There are other systems in which a judge is an esteemed civil service position and is something people go to school to do, and certainly is not elected. Quite different from the system in most US states where the District Court is packed with people who couldn't scrape out a $50,000/year income as a practicing lawyer and got themselves elected judge to get a steadier paycheck.

This is a pretty serious digression from the subject of this thread so we can take this to another thread if you like. Sorry for the derail.
 
RChildress107 said:
Agreed. My point still stands that these types of questions are common and don't always dictate how a justice is going to decide (or what basis they will decide on). Picking out certain questions and dumping them into the 24-hour news cycle is borderline irresponsible.

Scalia's written decisions leave plenty of room for attack, this just seems much ado about nothing.
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These types of "questions" are not common. There are maybe 1 or 2 cases per term where a justice says something as outrageous as what Scalia said here that suggests that he/she might be willing to subscribe to views that are well out of line with what we consider acceptable in society today.

And if you know at all how SCOTUS oral arguments work, you would know that there is no chance that Scalia brings up some random study in an amicus brief unless he thinks the point could be validly used in an opinion. Big difference from if it was an important argument in the petitioner's brief that the court would have to address. It's not just some passing fancy that he thinks could never have any merit but is just throwing out there for the hell of it.

Either way, zero chance if SCOTUS is going to further limit affirmative action (I doubt that they will straight-up ban it) that Roberts trusts Scalia to write a majority opinion that won't make the court look racist so this could very well be the only views of his that we get to see on the case. Nothing wrong with commenting on them
 
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PhDeac said:
Not only that but she had the opportunity to go to another state school and transfer into UT-Austin and graduate from there and she turned it down. Not sure if she tried to transfer from LSU to UT-Austin or not.

It's the ultimate millennial entitlement. She was a marginal candidate who didn't get into the college of her choice and she literally made a federal case out of it.
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Someone, somewhere, was eventually going to be the face of that case.

It's possible to be against Affirmative Action, and think this woman was the wrong person to be the face of that.
 
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