Opinion ID: 6328916
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Stay factors

Text: I agree the Board is entitled to a stay pending appeal under the traditional Nken standard. See Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 434 (2009). That is, the Board “has made a strong showing that [it] is likely to succeed on the merits,” that it “will be irreparably injured absent a stay,” that “issuance of the stay will [not] substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding,” and that a stay is in “the public interest.” Id. (quotation marks omitted).
In my view, the district court’s reasoning on the merits of the Coalition’s Equal Protection Clause claim is questionable in multiple respects. 6 1. I think the district court’s disparate impact analysis is likely flawed because it relies on the wrong comparator. The court’s conclusion that the new admissions policy has a disparate impact on Asian American applicants appears to have rested almost exclusively on a comparison between the percentage of Asian American applicants offered admission under the current policy and the percentage of such applicants offered admission under the former one, i.e., that “the number and proportion of Asian American students offered admission to TJ fell following the challenged changes.” A-222. The district court never explained, however, why the percentage of Asian American applicants offered enrollment under the prior policy is the proper baseline for comparison. The only case the district court cited in support of its statement that a “simple before-andafter comparison” is the proper method for assessing disparate impact, A-223—North Carolina State Conference of NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204, 231 (4th Cir. 2016)— simply does not say that. To the contrary, in addressing whether certain voting procedures disproportionately burdened African Americans, McCrory specifically rejected an election-to-election comparison of voter turnout to assess disparate impact. Id. at 232–33. Nor am I aware of any other authority for the proposition that current government policy creates a floor against which all future policies will be judged, a principle that would, if adopted, make it exceedingly difficult for government actors to change existing policies that have a real (albeit unintentional) racially disparate impact. To me, the more obviously relevant comparator for determining whether this race neutral admissions policy has an outsized impact on a particular racial group is the percentage of applicants versus the percentage of offers. Such a metric targets more directly 7 the core question for assessing disparate impact: whether members of one group have, proportionally, more difficulty securing admission than others. And, by that metric, there does not seem to be any disparate impact whatsoever. Indeed, during the one previous year under the challenged policy, Asian American applicants made up a higher percentage of students offered a spot at TJ (54.36%) than of total applicants (48.69%). A-102. The district court also suggested that the policy’s allocation of 1.5% of seats for the highest evaluated applicants from each public middle school and the preference for students from underrepresented middle schools disparately impacts Asian American applicants. A-223–24. The problem is that conclusion is barely reasoned and is not supported by a single citation to the record. To be sure, the Coalition’s brief opposing a stay includes its own citations in support of the district court’s conclusions. CA4 ECF 17 at 15. But the Board’s stay motion argues that the record shows just the opposite—that Asian American students are not differently situated from any other students when it comes to the 1.5% allocation or the preference for underrepresented middle schools, so those parts of the admissions policy do not disparately impact Asian American applicants at all. CA4 ECF 8-1 at 12–13. At the very least, the record reveals a likely dispute of fact on this question that would preclude summary judgment in favor of the Coalition. 2. I also am skeptical of the district court’s conclusion that there is no genuine issue of material fact implicated by its conclusion that the Board adopted the current admissions policy for a constitutionally impermissible purpose. A-235–36. The centerpiece of the district court’s analysis on this point is its statement that “the Board’s policy was 8 designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans at TJ.” Id. (emphasis added). That approach seems flatly inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Feeney involved a constitutional challenge to a Massachusetts statute mandating a categorical employment preference for qualified veterans over qualified non-veterans. 442 U.S. at 259. Even though “over 98% of the veterans in Massachusetts were male,” id. at 270—and even though no one claimed that those who crafted and decided to maintain the law were unaware of that fact—the Supreme Court declined to apply heightened scrutiny. In language directly relevant to this case, the Court specifically held that “awareness of consequences” is not enough to show discriminatory intent and that a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral policy must show that a decisionmaker acted “at least in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable group.” 442 U.S. at 279 (emphasis added). Nor does the fact that the current policy may have been adopted, at least in part, with the expectation that it would “increase Black and Hispanic enrollment” change this analysis. A-235–36. Under Feeney, the question is whether the decisionmaker acted “at least in part because of [a race neutral policy’s] adverse effects upon an identifiable group,” 442 U.S. at 279 (quotation marks and emphasis added), and the Coalition has never claimed that the challenged policy was motivated by or has any sort of adverse effect on Black or Hispanic applicants. This aspect of Feeney’s holding operates as a critical limitation on the 9 potential to lodge constitutional challenges to facially neutral laws of all stripes, which often are passed with the aim of winning favor with a particular constituency. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that it is constitutionally permissible to seek to increase racial (and other) diversity through race neutral means. Indeed, it has required public officials to consider such measures before turning to race conscious alternatives. See Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 570 U.S. 297, 312, 315 (2013) (stating that universities must consider whether “workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity” before considering race and remanding for further consideration of whether the university had done so); see also Texas Dep’t of Hous. and Community Affs. v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 576 U.S. 519, 545 (2015) (local housing authorities may “choose to foster diversity” with race neutral tools); City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 509–10 (1989) (governments may “increase the opportunities available to minority business” through measures such as altered “bidding procedures” that do not “classify[] individuals on the basis of race”). Under the district court’s analysis, it is difficult to see why policies such as Texas’s famous Top Ten Percent Law—which “grants automatic admission to any public state college . . . to all students in the top 10% of their class at high schools in Texas,” Fisher, 570 U.S. at 305, and was plainly intended at least in part to ensure that Texas’s public universities retained some measure of racial diversity after the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996)—would not have triggered strict scrutiny. Given these decades of guidance, it would be quite the judicial bait-and-switch to hold that such race neutral efforts—much less, the race blind policy at issue here—are also subject to strict scrutiny. 10 I am no more persuaded by the Coalition’s argument that the challenged policy was motivated by impermissible “racial balancing,” CA4 ECF 17 at 13, a term the Supreme Court has defined as striving for “some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin.” Fisher, 570 U.S. at 311 (quotation marks omitted). The race neutral policy challenged here includes no racial quotas or targets. And the Coalition appears to have identified no evidence that TJ’s current race neutral policy is intended to achieve a certain percentage of Black, Hispanic, or Asian American students— much less such overwhelming evidence as to warrant summary judgment in favor of the party that would bear the burden of proof at trial. 2 The district court’s extensive reliance on alleged procedural irregularities in the Board’s adoption of the challenged admissions policy also strikes me as unpersuasive, especially for purposes of granting summary judgment to the Coalition. The district court acknowledged that the Board’s actions did not violate any state law or procedural rules, A- 227, and, under Arlington Heights, procedural irregularities are not themselves proof of discriminatory intent, 429 U.S. at 267. Instead, “[d]epartures from the normal procedural sequence” are relevant to the extent they “afford evidence that improper purposes are playing a role.” Id. Here, the evidence the district court identified and certain statements highlighted by the Coalition, see CA4 ECF 17 at 17, tend to show what is not only obvious 2 The Coalition points to a presentation and various text messages between Board members discussing how certain proposed policies might reduce Asian American representation at TJ. CA4 ECF 17 at 6–8. As the Board explains, however, both the presentation and the messages were about different potential policies that the Board rejected. CA4 ECF 19 at 6–7 & n.4. 11 but, as discussed above, perfectly permissible under existing law—that the Board felt compelled to address TJ’s longstanding lack of diversity. Such evidence is hardly an appropriate basis for concluding—much less as a matter of law—that a race neutral policy was enacted with a constitutionally impermissible intent.
The Board has also shown that it will suffer irreparable harm without a stay. Preventing elected representatives from carrying out “a duly enacted” policy always “constitutes irreparable harm.” Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1303 (2012) (Roberts, C.J., in chambers). Moreover, there are currently 2,540 students awaiting their TJ admissions decisions, which are supposed to be released “no later than April” 2022. A- 246; A-283. The Board persuasively argues that there is no way for it simply to revert to the previous admissions policy. None of the current applicants was required to take the formerly mandated standardized tests, two-thirds of which are no longer commercially available. CA4 ECF 8-1 at 18; A-246. The Coalition insists that the Board should have approached competing vendors in anticipation of identifying replacement tests at some point last year or whipped up a fully formed backup plan even as it was defending its chosen policy in litigation, see CA4 ECF 17 at 20, 23, but that strikes me as completely unrealistic: It took the Board three months to adopt the challenged policy in the first place, A228–32, and the district court thought even that was “rushed,” A-232. 3 3 The Coalition also argues the Board should have been on notice of the need for a backup policy because the district court suggested in September 2021 that it could “try this case in January and get a decision,” which would be “plenty of time to get corrected (Continued) 12 I also am persuaded that requiring the Board to design a new admissions policy and then solicit and review applications under a new process, all on a highly compressed timetable and with little opportunity for community input or outreach, would irreparably damage its credibility and reputation in the community and irreparably harm TJ’s ability to compete for students, many of whom apply to other selective schools with late spring enrollment deadlines. See CA4 ECF 8-1 at 20. It is no mere “administrative inconvenience” the district court’s order mandates, CA4 ECF 17 at 23, but a gigantic undertaking. Such a significant outlay of public resources goes far beyond requiring private citizens to initiate routine administrative processes, see, e.g., Di Biase v. SPX Corp., 872 F.3d 224, 235 (4th Cir. 2017), and constitutes a “genuinely extraordinary situation” justifying interim equitable relief, Sampson v. Murray, 415 U.S. 61, 92 n.68 (1974). 4
The Coalition does not represent a class or putative class of applicants; rather, it is a group of interested parents and community members. Based on the record, it appears the Coalition has identified only two children of its members who are even eligible for whatever needs to be corrected.” CA4 ECF 17 at 9. But the district court did not reach a decision in January—instead, it granted summary judgment during the last week of February and did not deny the Board’s motion to stay until mid-March. 4 The Coalition suggests the Board could simply excise the two aspects of the current plan that the Coalition finds most objectionable. CA4 ECF 17 at 22. But if the Coalition is right that the current plan was adopted with discriminatory intent, it is not clear how these surgical alterations would remedy the constitutional problem. And, regardless, the Coalition offers zero analysis of how the current plan would function without those components. 13 admission to TJ this year, and those children may yet be admitted. See A-106; A-210; CA4 ECF 8-1 at 21. For that reason, it appears that the impact of a stay on the Coalition, if any, would be significantly less severe than the lack of a stay would be on the Board. See Nken, 556 U.S. at 435 (balance of the harms “assess[es] the harm to the opposing party” (emphasis added)). Likewise—even factoring in potential harms to similarly situated Asian American students whose parents are neither Coalition members nor otherwise parties—I think the public interest favors a stay given the timing and logistical constraints associated with scrapping the current admissions policy and creating a new one so close to the end of the current admissions cycle. If the district court’s order is not stayed, thousands of students and their families will be thrown into disarray for the next several months. By contrast, undisputed data presented to the district court show that a higher percentage of Asian American students were admitted than applied even under the current plan. Taking all this into account, it seems the more prudent course is to allow the current admissions cycle to proceed according to settled expectations and require a change, if any, beginning with the next class. 14