Court rejects challenges to gun licensing, gender support plans and school admissions
SCOTUS NEWS
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court declined to take up several hot-button issues. These included a challenge by parents to a school district’s plan to provide support for transgender and non-binary students, a dispute over the admissions policy used during 2021-22 school year for three of Boston’s elite public high schools, and he case of hawaiian man prosecuted for carrying armed without obtaining requisite license. The announcement was made in a list released by the justices following their private conference on Friday. The court on Friday afternoon added three new cases to its docket for the 2024-25 term; as expected, it did not grant review in any additional cases on Monday morning.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decisions not to grant review in both of the school cases. Alito said that the question at the heart of the parents’ challenge against the school district support plan was one of “great national importance,” and in the Boston case, he suggested that the court’s refusal to grant review would “perpetuate race-based affirmative actions in defiance” of the justices’ decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College from 2023. The guidance, among other things instructs staff to speak to a student first before discussing a student’s gender with a parent. In 2022, the district will create a gender support program for schools that will memorialize both the student and the district’s understanding about the student’s identity as well as their involvement in the process. Parents Protecting Our Children, a group that calls itself Parents Protecting Our Children, went to federal court in order to block the district’s guidance. The group argued the guidance interferes “with its members’ right to make decisions with and for their children.”
A Federal district court dismissed the lawsuit. The court noted that the group sought to block the entire guidance, without identifying “any instance of the School district applying the policy in a manner concerning or detrimental to parent rights.” The group did not allege that “even one member” had “experienced a real or imminent injury due to” the guidance and support plan. “Nor, for that matter,” the court of appeals continued, “do we see an indication that any of Parents Protecting’s members asked the School District about how it plans to implement the guidance.”
The group came to the Supreme Court in June, asking the justices to decide whether it has a legal right to sue, known as standing, to challenge the guidance and support plan. It argued that its case, “and the many like it, represent one of the most significant failures of the federal judicial system in our lifetime.”
But the school district urged the justices to stay out of the dispute, observing that “not a single member’s child has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, has expressed that they are gender non-conforming, has expressed gender identity issues, or has contacted anyone in the District to address the need for gender support.” The lawsuit cannot go forward, it wrote, because the group’s claim that it could be harmed by the district’s policy rests entirely on a “highly attenuated chain of future possibilities that may never occur.”
After considering the case at five consecutive conferences, and less than a week after the court heard arguments in the challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, the justices denied the group’s petition.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated, without explanation, that he would have granted the petition.
In a two-page opinion joined by Thomas, Alito dissented from the denial of review. He pushed back against the 7th Circuit’s conclusion that the group lacked a legal right to sue, arguing that “the parents’ fear that the school district might make decisions for their children without their knowledge and consent is not ‘speculative.'” Alito expressed concern that federal courts like the 7th Circuit in this case were “succumbing to the temptation to use the doctrine of” standing “as a way of avoiding some particularly contentious constitutional questions.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a challenge to the admissions program at three of Boston’s elite public high schools. The group that brought the case argued that the admissions program at those schools was discriminatory, despite the fact that it relies on applicants’ grades and zip code. The group argued that this violated the Constitution even if the white and Asian-American applicants still receive offers at the rate that reflects the representation of their applicant pool. In that case, the parents and alumni challenging the policy contended that it was intended to reduce the number of Asian-American students.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the Virginia case, in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
The three schools at the center of the Boston case are Boston Latin Academy, the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, and Boston Latin School, which was founded in 1635 and is the country’s oldest high school. They are known as “exam schools.” For two decades, until the 2021-22 school year, applicants were offered admission through a competitive process that relied on a combination of their grades and their scores on a standardized test.
In 2020-21, the last year that students were admitted using the previous system, the number of white students offered admission was more than double their representation in the citywide school-age population, while the number of Asian-American students offered admission was more than triple their representation.
In 2020, the Boston Public Schools formed a working group to recommend changes to the admissions process for the exam schools. The working group developed an “equity statement” which outlined the goals for the new criteria. The working group created an “equity impact statement” that outlined goals for the new admissions criteria. They included “a fair and clear process for admission for the ’21-22 year that takes into consideration the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic which disparately affected Boston families” and having the student enrollment “better represent
0 the racial and socioeconomic diversity of all students in the city
of Boston.” The new plan allotted 20% of seats in the exam schools to the students with the highest grades across the city. The remaining seats were allocated based on grades to the top students in each zip code.
Under the new plan, the percentage of white and Asian-American students who received offers of admission to the exam schools fell, but they continued to be overrepresented compared to their numbers in the pool of eligible applicants.
The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence, a nonprofit made up of students, parents, and alumni from the exam schools, filed a lawsuit against the School Committee in federal court. The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence argued that the new admissions policy violated the Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection by discriminating against whites and Asian-Americans. The parent coalition then went to the Supreme Court in the spring to ask the justices to step in. The coalition noted that the court had repeatedly “emphasized that [racial balance] for its own sake is inherently unconstitutional.” The coalition argued that the decision of the court of appeals “effectively licenses the government to discriminate against any race group with impunity, as long as this group continues to perform better than other groups.”
The School Committee asked the justices to remain out of the dispute. The School Committee stressed that the admissions policy at the heart of the case had only been in place for a year. It was implemented in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, when the school board couldn’t use an exam. The School Committee stressed that the coalition was not challenging the current policy, which takes into account grades, standardized tests scores, and geographic location. The School Committee stated that the dispute is over because the students who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the coalition could have applied for admission to the exam school under the current policy. He wrote that, “despite overwhelming evidence of intentional bias,” the lower courts had rejected the coalition’s claims on the grounds that, even with the new policy in place, white and Asian American students were still overrepresented among successful applicants. “This reasoning,” Alito stressed, “is indefensible.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a statement regarding the denial of review in which he acknowledged that the policy at the center of the coalition’s case is no longer in effect and therefore agreed with the court’s decision not to take up the case. He warned against interpreting the denial as an endorsement of the lower courts ruling. He also shared Alito’s concerns about the First Circuit analysis and urged “lower court facing similar cases” not to forget those concerns. Wilson filed a motion to dismiss the charges in July 2022. Wilson asked the Supreme Court to intervene this spring. He cited the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in which the justices ruled that courts can only uphold gun regulations if they have a history of such restrictions in early U.S. History. He said that the state supreme court’s ruling was “so fundamental, clear, and out of step with” the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions “that further briefing is unnecessary.” At a minimum, however, he suggested, the justices should take up the case themselves.
But the state urged the justices to stay out of the dispute. The state countered by saying that Bruen doesn’t prevent states from requiring people who want to carry a firearm in public to obtain a license. The state argued that Wilson does not have standing to challenge Hawaii’s licensing system because he has never applied for a license. And in any event, the state added, the case is still in its preliminary stages, because Wilson has not yet been tried.
Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, penned a statement regarding the denial of review in which he agreed that the fact that the case is still in its preliminary stages “weighs against” the Supreme Court’s intervention in the proceeding. But the Hawaii Supreme Court’s conclusion that Wilson cannot sue because he never applied for a license, Thomas added, “contravenes the settled principle that Americans need not engage in empty formalities before they can invoke their constitutional rights, and it wrongly reduces the Second Amendment to a ‘second-class right.'” In the proper case, Thomas made clear, he would grant review “to reaffirm that the Second Amendment warrants the same respect as any other constitutional right.”
The justices will meet again on Friday, Dec. 13, for another conference.[]This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
