Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gab TV, GETTR, Truth Social, Twitter
Edward Blum, a conservative legal strategist whose Students for Fair Admissions nonprofit was a plaintiff in both cases before the Supreme Court decision to rid private and public universities and colleges of racial affirmative action has been a long 30-year crusade.
Thursday’s victory before the highest court will have a domino effect across the country.
“The opinion issued today by the United States Supreme Court marks the beginning of the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation,” Mr. Blum stated after the decision was announced. “The polarizing, stigmatizing and unfair jurisprudence that allowed colleges and universities to use a student’s race and ethnicity as a factor to admit or reject them has been overruled. These discriminatory admission practices undermined the integrity of our country’s civil rights laws.”
Of the six cases Blum has been involved with before the Supreme Court, three have focused on race-based admissions at universities. Two involved University of Texas, which failed.
Blum is a former stockbroker and not a lawyer.
His next targets are state governments and federal regulators that require companies to use racial quotas for appointing people to their boards of directors.
Blum is suing the SEC over a rule requiring companies listed on the Nasdaq to have at least one female board member and one who self-identifies as Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, or Alaska Native, two or more races or ethnicities, or as LGBT. This case is now pending before the Fifth Circuit.
“It is not only investors who will suffer if Nasdaq’s virtue signaling rule is allowed to take effect,” his group says. “AFFBR has members who, because of their race, sex, and sexual orientation are forced to compete on an uneven playing field because of Nasdaq’s quota requirements.”
Also in his crosshairs is a similar rule passed by California in 2020 requiring companies based in that state to have a minimum number of directors from what the state considers “underrepresented groups.” A federal court ruled earlier this year, in Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment v. Weber, that the rule violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, the same clause cited by the Supreme Court in Thursday’s higher education decision.
His motivation for involvement in these cases reverts to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he interrupts as forbidding Americans to be treated differently because of race.
“I would like to see jurisprudence issued in which racial classifications are considered off-limits, except under the most extraordinary circumstances. Police seeking to infiltrate a race-based drug gang could hire someone of the same background, but that’s about it,” Blum has stated publicly.
