Stephen Miller warns schools of lawsuits if they ignore Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

Former White House adviser Stephen Miller last week warned law schools of possible lawsuits if they ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action issued.

Miller, the president of America First Legal, said Friday that his nonprofit organization sent a letter to the deans of 200 law schools across the country warning of future legal action if they do not heed the court’s ruling.

“Today, we sent a warning letter to the deans of 200 law schools around America, telling them that they must obey the Supreme Court’s ruling, striking down illegal racial discrimination and affirmative action,” Miller said in a video posted to Twitter. “If they tried to violate, circumvent or bypass, subvert or otherwise program around that ruling, we are going to take them to court. We are going to hold them to account.”

The Supreme Court invalidated admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) last week by ruling they did not comply with the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Miller’s organization said in a press release that its letters demand the schools immediately end practices that are in violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling. In a letter to John F. Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, Miller wrote that he was warning him “of the consequences that you and your institution will face if you fail to comply with or attempt to circumvent the Court’s ruling.”

“There are those within and outside your institutions who will tell you that you can develop an admissions scheme through pretext or proxy to achieve the same discriminatory outcome,” the letter reads. “Anyone telling you such a thing is coaching you to engage in illegal conduct in brazen violation of a Supreme Court ruling, lawbreaking in which you would be fully complicit and thus fully liable.”

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More on the Supreme Court’s ruling from The Hill

• Supreme Court upends affirmative action in college admissions
• READ: Supreme Court’s affirmative action majority opinion
• Thomas in rare occurrence reads affirmative action opinion from bench
• Five things to know about Supreme Court’s decision to curtail college affirmative action
• Black leaders blast Supreme Court for overturning affirmative action

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Senior officials at Harvard committed to obeying the ruling, saying in a statement that “we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.”

America First Legal Vice President and general counsel Gene Hamilton said in a statement that the organization is “ready to defend the right of any American harmed by these unlawful practices.”

“For too long, rather than being beacons of hope and serving as models of equal treatment under the law, law schools have used discriminatory practices that should offend every American,” Hamilton said. “These practices do not just infect and affect legal academia—they then inculcate generations of lawyers who fail to appreciate the meaning of true equality, fail to advance the rule of law, and who fail to speak truth to power with their clients.”