Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
Among the opinions issued during a busy session of the U.S. Supreme Court last week:

• The high court on Thursday ruled that race cannot be a factor in assigning students to public schools. The justices’ sharply divided 5-4 opinion, reports CNN, reflects the deep legal, social, and ethical divides over the volatile issue of race and education. In a ruling written by chief justice John Roberts, the court’s conservative majority argued that diversity should be assured in ways other than placement of students based on ethnicity: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But the dissenting minority, led by justice John Paul Stevens, argued that the majority’s ruling will “obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing re-segregation of public schools.”
• In another 5-4 decision, the high court held that a mentally ill Texas man could not be executed. According to a report from the Christian Science Monitor, the court sent the case of Scott Louis Panetti, a death-row inmate, back to the state’s lower courts for clarification of his mental status. The majority ruled that because Panetti has a long history of mental illness, he may lack a rational understanding of the purpose of his sentence. The ruling coincides with a trend of recent high court decisions that set tougher constitutional requirements for executing juveniles and the mentally retarded, according to the Monitor.
• The justices reversed a 96-year-old precedent that has had a profound impact on business practices and ethics — the laws prohibiting pricing agreements between manufacturers and retailers. Such agreements have been viewed as a violation of antitrust law, but last week’s decision opens the door for manufacturers to set a firm minimum price — rather than the “suggested retail price” — that stores must charge. In writing the 5-4 majority opinion, justice Anthony Kennedy contended that minimum price agreements are not anticompetitive, and that price-fixing complaints involving manufacturers and retailers should be considered on a case-by-case basis. The International Herald Tribune reports that the ruling reflects the court’s increasingly “flexible” approach to antitrust law in recent years.
• In a blow to White House policy, the court said that it will consider requests from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detention via the U.S. court system. According to the Financial Times, the move could be a significant setback to the Bush administration, which argues that terror detainees do not have the right to access the court system and can be judged in secret by closed military tribunals. Guantánamo has been at the vortex of a swirling debate about the rights of terror suspects, with some attorneys maintaining that denying any access to the justice system is a violation of legal ethics, and former administration members, including Colin Powell, publicly calling for Guantánamo’s closing.