America and the Courts

I recently found a show on C-SPAN I like. It's called America and the Courts and is weekly. One episode showed a panel of lawyers and law professors discussing a case. This last Saturday they played the Supreme Court oral arguments of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. showing the picture and name of the speaker (no, it's not HiDef). I think Edward R. Murrow would be pleased with this show.

The arguments in this case have been called some of the most interesting in quite some time. In the case, a Seattle school district considered the race of the students in deciding placement amongst schools in order to achieve racially diverse schools. Some parents denied the first choice of schools for their students claim this is discrimination based solely on race. So this is basically an affirmative action case (though even that is something that came up in the arguments).

ScotusBlog has some interesting commentary on the case: in Analysis: Schools' race experiments may be doomed and in A New Perspective on Monday's Arguments: Take 1 and Take 2.