Complaint Challenging Legacy Admissions Faces Legal Problems

WASHINGTON - July 7, 2023 - PRLog -- In response to the Supreme Court's ruling that universities can no longer consider race as a factor in admission, several organizations have filed a complaint with the Office For Civil Rights seeking a similar ban on giving preference to legacy applicants; e.g., applicants with a parent who graduated from Harvard.

Although it uses many of the same catch phrases which supported the successful public opinion fight against Harvard's race bias in admissions, there are important differences between the legal actions which could defeat this new effort, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who has won over 100 legal actions against illegal discrimination.

These differences, and problems for the legacy complaint, include the very limited protections offered by the Constitution, the words of the civil rights statute under which the complaint was filed, a Supreme Court decision and several more recent ones in lower courts, and even common sense.

In 1947 the Supreme Court rejected, in Kotch v. Board of River Port Pilot Comm's, a claim that a practice which rewards only the children of prior recipients of a valued position violated the Constitution; here, children of local pilots licensed to guide vessels in harbors.

That ruling has been cited and relied upon in many subsequent cases, including Parker v. Roth in which the court held that the Fourteenth Amendment permits the States a wide scope of discretion in enacting laws which affect some groups of citizens differently than others. It held that the constitutional safeguard is offended only if the classification rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the State's objective.

Then, only two years ago, in Bratcher v. State Farm Fire, the court said "as a general rule, a law is not violative of the Fourteenth Amendment, despite the existence of discrimination in the technical or broad sense, where the law at issue maintains some rational connection with a legitimate state interest."

The complainants seek to get around the limiting language of the protections afforded by Title VI by relying upon regulations which do not have have the force and effect of statutes and their express language.

So while the words of both the Constitution and of Title VI do not appear to support the complainants' position, case law has often rejected it, and common sense would seem to undercut it, it is quite possible that Harvard and other universities might be required by public pressure for fairness, and to help boost the percentage of Blacks and Hispanics anticipated to shrink as a result of the decision banning racial preferences, to eliminate or at least to sharply restrict its current legacy admissions policy.

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