A few weeks ago on this page, we opined that it seemed odd that a panel of the federal Court of Appeals went forward with a 2-1 ruling overturning a lower court’s pronouncement that the Fairfax County School Board’s changes to admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology violated federal law.
We said then that the timing was strange – with the U.S. Supreme Court set to rule on cases (at the college level) that were close enough to the TJ case, why not just await a final ruling there before moving forward?
The Supreme Court did rule, and its 6-3 decision on a number of affirmative-action cases seems to be in the opposite direction from where the appeals court went in its ruling on TJ.
Which again begs the questions: What was the rush of the appeals-court panel? And what do the judges plan to do about it now that the underpinning of their ruling seems to have been so tenuous? Stay tuned . . .
