By John Leschak
On Tuesday night, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke at the University’s School of Law. Although many University students though Alito’s presence was a great honor, I thought it was a disgrace. Alito has far-right views and, as a federal judge, he has launched a judicial attack on the civil rights of women, minorities and workers.
Alito has a callous disregard of the sexist violence and discrimination women face in American society. In 2007, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Inc., Alito wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion, which set a mere 180-day filing deadline for employees to sue for sexual discrimination in pay. Ledbetter was the only female in upper management at the defendant’s plant. After working there for several years she found out that her male colleagues had received big raises while she had not.
The trial court found that Ledbetter’s failure to get a raise resulted from the sexism of her supervisors, and the jury awarded her monetary damages. Although the actual sexual discrimination was not disputed, Alito overturned the trial court’s decision because Ledbetter had not discovered the discrimination and filed a lawsuit against it within 180 days. In affect, the Ledbetter decision sanctions the glass ceiling to women’s wages.
Alito is also in denial of the continuing racism affecting our public schools. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, also decided in 2007, Alito joined an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts stating that race cannot be used as a factor in assigning children to particular public schools. Alito opposes affirmative action because he believes that it is no longer necessary. But, our public schools are becoming resegregated all over the country. Minority children often attend schools of lower quality than white children because less money is available to their school districts than that available to those of whites. These economic inequalities are tied to race.
He wrote, “Only 15 percent of the intensely segregated white schools in the nation have student populations in which more than half are poor enough to be receiving free meals or reduced price meals. By contrast, a staggering 86 percent of intensely segregated black and Latino schools have student enrollments in which more than half are poor by the same standards. A segregated, inner-city school is almost 6 times as likely to be a school of concentrated poverty as is a school that has an overwhelmingly white population” (Kozol, J., The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, NY: Crown Publishers, 2005, p. 20).
Whether the forces of segregation are state sanctioned, as they were fifty years ago, or socioeconomic, as they are today, should make absolutely no difference under the Constitution because today’s racial status quo is a product of the state’s inaction. To make matters worse, conservatives like Alito have re-interpretated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution to be a tool of the white majority to maintain its dominance, rather than a mechanism to improve the situation of minorities.
Whereas Alito is in denial of the sexism and racism of our society, I oppose Alito’s judicial views and call for Congress to pass legislation to negate the effect of the Ledbetter and Seattle School District decisions.
John Leschak is a first-year law student. You may e-mail him at [email protected].