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Duration : 40 sec
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman, Associated Press Writer 3 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters “understandably attract this court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them.”
Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg’s dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday.
Kennedy’s opinion made only passing reference to the work of Sotomayor and the other two judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who upheld a lower court ruling in favor of New Haven.
But the appellate judges have been criticized for producing a cursory opinion that failed to deal with “indisputably complex and far from well-settled” questions, in the words of another appeals court judge, Sotomayor mentor Jose Cabranes.
“This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal,” Cabranes said, in a dissent from the full 2nd Circuit’s decision not to hear the case.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Sotomayor should not be criticized for the unsigned appeals court decision, which he asserted she did not write. “Judge Sotomayor and the lower court panel did what judges are supposed to do, they followed precedent,” said the Vermont Democrat who will preside over Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings next month.
Leahy also called the high court decision “cramped” and wrong.
In New Haven, Nancy Ricci, whose son, Frank, was the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit, carried a large cake decorated with red, white and blue frosting into the law office where the firefighters were celebrating their victory.
Ricci’s father, Jim Ricci said the ruling is a victory for firefighters across the country. “Now we’re going to get the best managers as far as firefighters go. That’s really important,” Ricci said.
Monday’s decision has its origins in New Haven’s need to fill vacancies for lieutenants and captains in its fire department. It hired an outside firm to design a test, which was given to 77 candidates for lieutenant and 41 candidates for captain.
Fifty six firefighters passed the exams, including 41 whites, 22 blacks and 18 Hispanics. But of those, only 17 whites and two Hispanics could expect promotion.
The city eventually decided not to use the exam to determine promotions. It said it acted because it might have been vulnerable to claims that the exam had a “disparate impact” on minorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The white firefighters said the decision violated the same law’s prohibition on intentional discrimination.
Kennedy said an employer needs a “strong basis in evidence” to believe it will be held liable in a disparate impact lawsuit. New Haven had no such evidence, he said.
The city declined to validate the test after it was given, a step that could have identified flaws or determined that there were no serious problems with it. In addition, city officials could not say what was wrong with the test, other than the racially skewed results.
“The city could be liable for disparate-impact discrimination only if the examinations were not job related” or the city failed to use a less discriminatory alternative, Kennedy said. “We conclude that there is no strong basis in evidence to establish that the test was deficient in either of these respects.”
But Ginsburg said the court should have assessed “the starkly disparate results” of the exams against the backdrop of historical and ongoing inequality in the New Haven fire department. As of 2003, she said, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains was African-American.
Until this decision, Ginsburg said, the civil rights law’s prohibitions on intentional discrimination and disparate impact were complementary, both aimed at ending workplace discrimination.
“Today’s decision sets these paired directives at odds,” she said.
This is the ONLY place to SEE THIS SIDE of the CANIDATES!!! DO NOT MISS THIS
Duration : 2 min 44 sec
Who is an African? At face value, the answer seems obvious. Surely, everyone knows who the African is, it would seem. But the answer becomes less obvious once other probing qualifiers are added to the question. How is the African identity constructed in the face of the mosaic of identities that people of African ancestry living within and beyond the continent bear? Do all categorised as Africans or as having an African pedigree perceive themselves as Africans? Are all who perceive themselves as Africans accepted as such? Are there levels of “Africanness,” and are some more African than others? How does African identity interface with other levels of identity and citizenship in Africa? And what are the implications of the contentious nature of African identity and citizenship for the projects of pan-Africanism, the making of the Africa-nation, and Africa’s development trajectories? Contributors to the volume, including Ali Mazrui, Kwesi Prah, Gamal Nkrumah, Helmi Sharawy and Marcel Kitissou, address these questions and more. They examine the issues of African identity and citizenship, the politics spurned by the co-existence of peoples of different Africanities in the same country, and the prospects of constructing an Africa-Nation in which Africans of all hues are as sentimentally attached to, as say, the Europeans are attached to Europe. Though the projects of pan-Africanism and the making of the Africa-nation have not achieved the desired levels of success, some of the contributors found sufficient grounds for optimism: These grounds include the deepening democratic ethos in the continent, which is believed will unleash a love of freedom that will supersede the fissiparous tendencies that underlie the various notions of Africanity; and the rise of new economic powers such as India and China, which are increasingly looking towards Africa as the next big destination. The emergence of Barrack Obama, whose father is Kenyan, as the President of the United States of
Barrack Obama for President 12×18 Giclee on canvas by Buyenlarge Series: Election Campaigns Artist: Wilbur Pierce Period: Source country: USA Source Year: 2008 Barrack Obama for President 12 inch by 18 inch Giclee print on Canvas. All files are stored digitally and are ready for reproduction. The
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." – George Orwell
SUCH AS…
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." – Noam Chomsky
OR…
"It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people" – Gore Vidal
/ Let alone the fact that most of the voting will be done on Diebold & friends machines, exposing American democracy as the sinister & cynical farce it has become under the proto-fascism Bush/Cheney junta.
Duration : 2 min 50 sec
