Can the U.S. Naval Academy continue to use race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, even though the Supreme Court last year expressly forbade the use of race in college admissions in two related cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC?
The answer is yes, according to U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett, who presided over a nine-day bench trial in September.
However, I continue to believe the clear answer is “no,” as I have argued elsewhere. Bennett’s 175-page opinion is, with all due respect, not convincing, as I discuss below.
As a policy matter, it is likely that the nation’s military service academies will be prohibited from using race in admissions under the second Trump administration. Depending on how the new administration implements the policy, that may settle the issue as a legal…
