Early Reactions to the Ruling in Ricci

The reactions so far to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano are as polarized as the justices' opinions. And much of the commentary is focusing on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

Wendy Long, counsel to the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, released a statement saying the outcome reflects poorly on Sotomayor, who participated in the case as part of a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. She also voted against the appeals court rehearing the case en banc.

"Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error," Long said. "Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession. What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One."

Over at SCOTUSblog, Thomas Goldstein of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld initially wrote this morning that justices stayed away from how the 2nd Circuit handled the case. The opinions today, he wrote, "have almost no discussion of the court of appeals' ruling. Justice Ginsburg has a short discussion of how the ruling reflected prior Second Circuit precedent." But he then quotes Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who wrote that lower courts had denied petitioners the "evenhanded enforcement of the law."

Even before the ruling came down, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way released a statement from Marge Baker, its executive vice president. The "Supreme Court’s ruling, whatever it may be, will not reflect upon Sotomayor’s jurisprudence," Baker said. "Sotomayor and her panel colleagues were bound by longstanding precedent and federal law. They applied the law without regard to their personal views and unanimously affirmed the district court ruling. To do anything but would have been judicial activism."

Comments

[John Lowry]

I fail to see why it is so hard for so many to simply take "racial discrimination is illegal" at face value.

[Max Kennerly]

Thankfully, they ignored the constitutional claims -- the case simply wasn't procedurally ripe for them at this point. Scalia complained about that in his dissent, saying the case merely postponed the day such would be decided.

The disappointing part is that the Supreme Court, sua sponte, converted defendant's motion to dismiss into plaintiff's motion for summary judgment, and simply entered a factual determination against New Haven, despite no discovery or factfinding having actually occurred. That is disappointing for the same reasons that Twombly was disappointing -- the Supreme Court has no facts before it except for plaintiff's complaint so how, exactly, could they reach a final conclusion of the facts?

I think Ginsburg has it right -- the majority's "strong basis in the evidence" rule is untenable and impossible to apply, and will inevitably result in another case on the same issue being heard in the near future.