You Got the Wrong Guy

Part of my job is to be engaged on issues of law and public policy, so I am usually happy to talk to the media and pleased when the law school’s clipping service picks up some brilliant comment that I have made and posts it to the school’s website. They miss most of them so I guess that I’m not as brilliant as I think. (But I knew that.)

But there is one up there as we speak from the Lehighton (Pa.) Time-News reporting my comment on the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStafano. I did issue some comments on Ricci through the Heartland Institute where I am a Policy Advisor.

But I didn’t say what was quoted in the article.

The quoted statement actually came from Chris Hage who is the President of the Chicago Lawyers’ Chapter of the Federalist Society of Law and Public Policy. I said this:

“Today’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano makes clear that employers may not use fear of litigation to justify hiring decisions based on race. If fear of a disparate impact claim under Title VII would permit employers to abandon nondiscriminatory hiring methods whenever those methods failed to produce an ‘acceptable’ number of minority hires, then the distinction between disparate treatment claims and mandatory quotas would be blurry at best. To allow the fear of litigation to justify racially based hiring in order to ‘get the numbers right’ would undermine the principle of racial evenhandedness that both Title VII and the Fourteenth Amendment are intended to guarantee.”

I don’t know if they wanted Mr. Hage’s statement and attributed it to me or wanted my statement and took Mr. Hage. I am sure, in any event, that Professor Secunda probably disagrees with my real remarks as much as what I didn’t say. But accuracy — both here and in Lehighton — is important.

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