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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

This ruling was expected. The judge had been stalling on making a ruling to make it take time to work its way through the appeals courts and get to the Supreme Court where the policy might actually get ruled unconstitutional.

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I hope it is ruled unconstitutional. As a citizen of the US I was discriminated against based on the color of my skin while others due to race or gender received tens of thousands of dollars in free money.

Unlikely to be ruled unconstitutional with the current makeup of the Supreme Court. A case brought against the University of Texas in 2016 ruled 4-3 basically the same way, with one justice recusing and another justice had died and not yet been replaced.

Really? Kennedy is gone and was replaced by Kavanaugh. Kennedy was in the majority (pro-AA) in the 2016 case, and I would venture to guess (based on nothing more than the discussions in the legal circles I'm in) that Kavanaugh would not be as friendly to affirmative action as Kennedy was.

If I were a betting man, I'd put the odds north of 2:1 that this will be overturned if the current SCOTUS sees it.

Kagan, an Obama nominee, skipped the Texas case. I think it'd be ruled the same way this time.

It was a 4-3 decision in a 8 member court (with Justice Kagan recusing herself, as you mentioned). It's a 5-4 reverse decision now based on ideology alone.

I would guess it would be 5-4 against Harvard, with Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts in the majority. Which one of these would you have ruling in favor of Harvard's AA plan?

I believe Roberts would vote with Harvard.

The same Justice Roberts who said: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_...

Yep - I believe he will wordsmith it to use words like "race-conscious" instead of "race-discrimination" and vote with Harvard.

It is absurd that a judge would knowingly make a judgement that a higher court will overturn.

Apart from anything else a waste of taxpayer money.

> It is absurd that a judge would knowingly make a judgement that a higher court will overturn.

If the judge makes the ruling based on previous rulings made by the higher court, while knowing that the higher court is likely to now overturn those rulings, it is still absurd?

The way the US system works is that lower courts are generally bound by previous higher court decisions, assuming those decisions are germane to the case in question.

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