Just How Bad Was the Dissent in SFFA v. Harvard?

By George Leef

Monday, July 03, 2023

 

Last week, the Supreme Court declared in a 6–3 ruling that the racial-preference programs that nearly all selective colleges and universities use to achieve student-body “diversity” violate the 14th Amendment.

 

As expected, that holding didn’t go down well with the Court’s “progressives” — Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. They dissented in shrill tones. But it wasn’t just the shrillness that was notable, but the way the dissenters tried to make their case for keeping racial preferences. They didn’t offer much of a legal argument at all, but rather wrote something more like a paper for a undergrad political-science or sociology class.

 

In this Liberty Unyielding post, Hans Bader takes a look at the dissent.

 

He writes:

 

In their dissent, the three progressive justices made false claims about health disparities between blacks and whites, inaccurately claiming that black babies are much less likely to survive with a white physician (a claim debunked in the National Review, Daily Signal, and other sources), and falsely implying that racial minorities in general have shorter life spans than whites (in fact, Hispanics and Asians typically live longer than whites).

 

Oh, but what are mere facts when you’re preaching for “social justice”?