The New Haven Firefighter Case

Great Debates
221

Good for SCOTUS on this. It amazes me that in the year 2009, we still give people preferential treatment based on the color of their skin. If I understand correctly, there is no evidence that the test had any biased questions? It was simply that blacks and hispanics didn’t pass it in the proper numbers? Ridiculous.

Oh, well, there was the “the test didn’t accurately test skills needed to be a firefighter” crap which I hear all of the time. Anytime that someone bombs the test it is the test’s fault. We will never, ever get past race in this country until we start treating people equally, and quit pretending that blacks are like 4 year old kids who can’t do anything unless they are spoon fed…

222

Agreed. And frankly, most of us here on the SDMB would be perfectly happy to say all 9 justices got something wrong…we are pretty independent thinkers.

And I also agree that New Haven may well have been screwed either way. It’s what happens when you create legislation based on a bad premise. In this case the bad premise is that filtering processes which result in unequal outcomes are prima facie evidence that the filtering process was unfair. If it is not a consideration that different cohorts are differently enabled, and it turns out they actually are differently enabled, the whole premise that it must be the test which is invalid, is wrong. Bad premises make bad law.

We should decide as a just society that we want broad representation wherever safely possible. We should decide which cohorts deserve recognition as a cohort, and we should set aside positions for those cohorts. It is an error to pretend that all cohorts have equal innate ability, and nothing–nothing–has ever shown otherwise. In point of fact, the daily experience of millions all over the world is pretty much the same observation.

Until we stop classifying ourselves–and a big part of that is atavistic–there will be a perception of persistent unfairness is we don’t try to get equal representation from those various classifications of people. We do need to try and make sure that doesn’t happen. Pretending that biological differences don’t exist, though, is not a very viable long-term approach.

223

It seems to me that the Court sent the message that acting simply to avoid potential liability isn’t enough; fair, objective decision making should be the goal.

224

IANAL, but couldn’t the city have been sued for breach of contract? If I am a firefighter who passed the test, black or white, then I devoted a considerable amount of time and money under the assurance that this test would be used to determine my employment future.

Then, I succeed only to be told that they had changed the rules?

225

Appellate Courts generally have to respect the trial court’s finding of fact, they can usually only reverse lower courts (absent obvious error) on misinterpretation or misapplication of the law.

Same things with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is breaking new ground here not chastising the appellate court for breaking new ground.

226

I posed this question to **Chief Pendant ** sometime ago, so I’ll pose it to you: Where is the scientific data? Performing an experiment comparing synaptic markers between blacks and whites ought to be sufficient. One could go one step further by exploring whether blacks express less of the proteins required for memory storage and retrieval. If you believe blacks are less intelligent due to genes, point to one. Just one. We have 30,000 of them. Just pick one. If you or anyone else believe so earnestly that there are cognitive differences, what is your proof? Because I’m looking through the literature and I can’t find a shred of evidence. Its unclear to me how one can say “Blacks are **genetically **inferior” but unable to point to any genetic study that says it.

Maybe I ought to open a new thread.

  • Honesty
227

The irony of this situation is that Sotomayer is being criticised by the right for failing to override the law passed by congress and the SCOTUS is being praised for creating new “policy” relating to the law. Remember when Sotomayer was being raked over the coals for saying appealate courts create policy?

Sometimes I wish hypocrisy was a capital crime.

228

The argument is much simpler than that.
There are two possibilities for differing outcomes: nature and nurture.

If you control for one, remaining differences are the result of the other.

If you take group averages, you get a…group average. This is not extensible to an individual, of course. But if we take all comers in a cohort–even if that cohort is not genetically related–and compare it with a different cohort, and control for nurture, what is left is genetic. So as an example, if we took all tall people and compared them with short people, and controlled for nurturing influences such as nutrition, say–then the differences between the two groups is likely the result of genetic differences for whatever it is that genetically influences height. We do not need to identify tall genes or the biologic expression pathways influencing height phenotypes to infer that this is correct. It’s the only remaining possibility. Similarly, if we control for putative nurturing factors such as income or educational access, or whatever, and are left with immutable differences in standardized testing, we can infer that performance differences between two cohorts are genetically based. The eternal argument against this line of reasoning to date is that these differences are impossible to control for, but to date no effort to ameliorate nurturing differences has resulted in equivalent scores.

It’s not necessary to find a specific gene any more than it’s necessary to find a specific nurturing factor if the genes are held constant. As an example, identical twins have very similar genes, so the conclusion is drawn that differences in how they turn out are largely nurture. We don’t have to define which nurturing influence determined how they turned out to know this is correct.

And FWIW, although you are hearing “inferior” instead of “differently enabled,” any two cohorts are more likely to have average genetically-defined differences that are superior in some aspects and inferior in others. I don’t see whites–as a self-described cohort–superior in athletic skills, for instance.

Nevertheless, if you are more comfortable that the evidence for genetic differences in self-ascribed racial cohorts is weak, I see no great reason to dissuade you. What’s the point? We are all individuals, and our group associations are essentially self-chosen and self-assigned. It is an issue for me only where social policy and broad perceptions of a just society are concerned, because (in the case at hand) laws based on incorrect premises result in exactly the kind of untenable situation that New Haven found itself in.

At a policy level it seems a much more productive approach to assume that differences exist, that people are going to identify with traditional racial cohorts, and that there is a value in promoting diverse representation of those cohorts wherever possible.

229

I’m not the person who stood up in front of God and everybody and said a wise Hispanic woman would reach better conclusions than a white male.

She promoted a similar case as an Hispanic activist so she clearly thinks it’s OK to discriminate based on race. IMO she rubber stamped this case in an attempt to maintain the quota mentality of Title VII.

There is nothing ambiguous about the racial discrimination in this case and it shouldn’t have taken the SC to rule on it. Sotomayor would never have reached her current career level if not for her ethnicity. This is not a reason to be a member of the SC.

230

[QUOTE=Magiver]
I’m not the person who stood up in front of God and everybody and said a wise Hispanic woman would reach better conclusions than a white male.
[/QUOTE]
Almost, she said:

[QUOTE=Judge Sotomayor]
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
[/QUOTE]
She said this in regards to discrimination cases IIRC. Note, she hopes that a wise Latina woman would reach a better conclusion. Note that other Supreme court justices have said their background would also play a role in their decision making process.
[QUOTE=Justice Alito]
When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.
[/QUOTE]
How is this different? Does this sit OK with you Magiver?

[QUOTE=Magiver]
<snip> IMO she rubber stamped this case in an attempt to maintain the quota mentality of Title VII.
[/QUOTE]
Why do you believe this? From Wikipedia:

[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
On appeal, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (Pooler, Sack and Sotomayor, C.JJ.) heard arguments in this case of alleged discrimination.[13] Judge Sotomayor (who was subsequently nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court) vigorously questioned the attorneys in the case, and repeatedly discussed whether the city had a right to attempt to reformulate its test if it was afraid that the original test was discriminatory.[13] The three-judge panel then affirmed the district court’s ruling in a summary order, without opinion, on February 15, 2008.[14]
However, after a judge of the Second Circuit requested that the court hear the case en banc, the panel withdrew its summary order and on June 9, 2008 issued instead a unanimous per curiam opinion.[15] The panel’s June 9, 2008 per curiam opinion was eight sentences long. It characterized the trial court’s decision as “thorough, thoughtful and well-reasoned” while also lamenting that there were “no good alternatives” in the case. The panel expressed sympathy to the plaintiffs’ situation, particularly Ricci’s, but ultimately concluded that the Civil Service Board was acting to “fulfill its obligations under Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act]”. The panel concluded by adopting the trial court’s opinion in its entirety.[15]

[/QUOTE]
To me it seems that they were only trying to follow the original intent of the law. They were being conservative. Whether or not I think that Title VII is a good law, I believe the appeals court was trying to apply the law as written and intended, just like the city and the lower court. In a certain light it appears that the Supreme Court has just been activist and legislated from the bench. Do you have any opinion on this matter? Why is the Supreme Court decision not activist when the text of title VII is clear?

[QUOTE=Magiver]
<snip> Sotomayor would never have reached her current career level if not for her ethnicity. This is not a reason to be a member of the SC.
[/QUOTE]
You’re kidding right? Lets take a look at her history (taken from Wikipedia):

[ul]
[li]Sotomayor attended the parochial Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record.[/li][li]Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, the academically rigorous parochial Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. <snip> At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.[/li][li]Attended Priceton University.[/li][li]As a senior (at Princeton) Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the top award for undergraduates, which reflected both strong grades and extracurricular activities.[/li][li]She was also to Phi Beta Kappa.[/li][li]In 1976 she was awarded an A.B. from Princeton, graduating summa cum laude.[/li][li]Recieved her J.D. from Yale Law school.[/li][li]While at Yale, she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.[/li][li]She was an assistant District Attorney in New York for 5 years.[/li][li]She worked in private practice for 8 years where she worked for a number of high profile clients[/li][li]She was nominated to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York where she presided for 5 years. During her tenure she was regarded as a centrist that relied on facts.[/li][li]She was then nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit where she has been for the last 10 years.[/ul]Tell me what it is about her history that makes her unqualified for the positions she has held. Or, to be precise, tell me where her history would have differed if she had a different ethnicity. [/li]
Finally, what do you think of Justice Thomas? Is he on the court only because of his ethnicity?

What about Justice Kennedy? In many ways Judge Sotomayor has had a more distinguished career than Justice Kennedy, surely you are not saying he got his position because of his ethnicity?

231

It will be interesting to see if Judge Sotomayor surprises her more liberal supporters by being more conservative than they had hoped (on abortion, for instance) in the same way past conservative supporters have had their picks ending up being more liberal.

While there is no way to quanitfy it, experiences such as the New Haven case also temper future positions for those involved, I suspect.

232

Judges who get elevated to the top court frequently do end up surprising their promoters. The obvious example is Chief Justice Warren, who it seems to me might have made the same protestations to President Eisenhower that Thomas Becket made to Henry II. :stuck_out_tongue:

The justice Judge Sotomayor is replacing is also an example.

233

Controlling for nurture is close to impossible when you’re dealing with ethnic groups that have two very different histories and sociocultural backgrounds, so while what you’re saying is not exactly incorrect, it is theoretical and thus an oversimplication.

You could control for household income and educational level, but that still leaves out variables like number of generations post-poverty, educational level of relatives and other contacts, education quality, sociocultural values, and personal beliefs (conscious and unconscious) about one’s own aptitude level and ability to perform well on tests. If you’re comparing two groups–one which has been raised seeing plenty of doctors, lawyers, and astronauts that look like them, and whose intelligence as a group is not routinely doubted and dismissed…and one which has been raised seeing themselves as basketball players and singers, and whose intelligence has been portrayed as inferior–why would you expect to draw any conclusions about genetics when its impossible to tease out the effect this social programming, if any, has on test-taking ability?

Seems to me that it would be much easier to go to the genes themselves and look for the differences you claim exist. There are fewer confounders to worry about and it’s more to the point.

234

Not to derail this thread, I’ll be opening a new thread later this week. I think this is worth discussing.

235

According to at least one Appellate Judge she would not have made it to Princeton based on her high school grades. She got in based on affirmative action and not her merits. I give her credit for doing well in college but she bumped out someone who ostensibly would have done better.

236

If she graduated valedictorian of her high school, it’s odd that she wouldn’t be able to make it into Princeton based on high school grades. Sound like this Appellate Judge is mistaken.

237

“According to at least one Appellate Judge”?

Seriously?

238

Yep.

239

Ridiculous.

Name the judge.

Explain why the judge knows something about her high school grades.

Tell us who he was speaking to, on what occasion.

Answer the just-raised point that, as the very post you were responding to says, she was Valedictorian.

You know, I myself sometimes form opinions based on unattributed quotes from dubious sources. But I have the sense not to go around telling people this in arguments in places like the SDMB.

240

You’re sexual bias is showing, it was not a he, it was Judge Sotomayor.