Greg Stohr offers Bloomberg Businessweek readers an interesting article about what’s really at stake when the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case pitting a former law student against the University of Texas.
In 2008, Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas to force the school to reconsider her rejected undergraduate application without taking her race into account. (She’s white.) On Dec. 9, Fisher’s case, which may set an important precedent on the constitutionality of race-based admissions, will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. But Fisher, now 25, won’t be directly affected by the result when the justices rule next spring. As her claim progressed through the courts, she enrolled at Louisiana State University, earned her degree, and then moved to Austin, where UT is located, to take a job as a financial analyst. Her only direct stake in the outcome of the case is a request that UT refund her $50 application fee and a $50 housing deposit. The university says she has no right to a refund.
Welcome to the world of ideologically driven Supreme Court litigation, where named plaintiffs often play bit roles in battles waged by legal advocacy groups pursuing policy changes. “I don’t think anybody thinks Abigail Fisher’s attorneys are litigating this case so that their client can get $100,” says Richard Re, an assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who specializes in constitutional law and the federal courts. “They’re litigating this case because of the principle.”
Fisher’s suit was the brainchild of Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who now spends his days organizing lawsuits to fight racial preferences and classifications. Blum’s one-man operation, the nonprofit Project on Fair Representation, is backed by conservative groups including the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Washington-based Searle Freedom Trust.
Blum, a former Austin resident who now splits his time between Florida and Maine, spent more than two years trying to recruit a plaintiff for his UT challenge. He set up a website, spoke to student groups, and networked before finally landing on Fisher through her father, a UT alumnus. “Abby continues with this case not in order to seek that monetary restitution, but rather because she is committed to ending for future applicants the unfair and unnecessary use of race at the University of Texas,” Blum says. Fisher said in a video provided by Blum that “it’s really great to have a voice in this and to stand up for an issue that I believe in.” She declined to be interviewed.
Blum is behind similar lawsuits filed in 2014 on behalf of a group of unnamed applicants against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Those cases, which are pending at the trial court level, have the potential to wipe out the use of race in admissions altogether.
