Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The New Haven Case

MANIFESTO

Connecticut is much in the news today as
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments this morning on a reverse discrimination complaint by a group of white New Haven firefighters who claim they were denied promotion because the city illegally rejected their top promotional examination scores when black colleagues scored relatively poorly on the same test.

The case, Ricci v. DeStefano, is the first to come before the court under Chief Justice John Roberts that broadly raises the issue of race in the work place. The court's decision could reshape hiring and promotional policies for millions of the nation's public employees—and possibly for private employers as well.
NPR and a number of other outlets were all over this story earlier today, and while I'm, at best, of two minds on this issue, the court's ultimate decision is one that, as the article points out, could be extraordinarily consequential.

2 Comments:

Blogger Steve said...

According to today's Hartford Courand (and I have no reason to doubt the longest running continuosly published daily newspaper in this great land!) the New Haven case is "the first to come before the court under Chief Justice John Roberts that broadly raises the issue of race in the work place". Chief Justice Roberts may actually be Yogi Berra or at the very least a devotee of Berraisms. In a majority opinion in 2007 dealing with racial discrimination Chief Justice Roberts wrote "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race". Somewhere Mr. Peter Lawrence Berra is smiling.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:47:00 PM  
Blogger Steve said...

make that today's Hartford CouranT

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 2:48:00 PM  

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