WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a Montgomery County school admissions case over what plaintiffs must show when challenging a policy that does not expressly classify applicants by race.
The justices limited review in Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education to one question. Must challengers show that the racial group allegedly targeted suffered an overall disadvantage relative to its share of the applicant pool?
The Supreme Court accepted that question in its Oct. 19 order list. The decision to hear the case does not resolve whether the admissions policy is unlawful.
The court also granted review in Department of Justice v. Scott McNutt. That entry did not describe the underlying dispute or limit the questions to be considered.
Sotomayor Questions Chicago Vehicle Forfeitures
A challenge to Chicago’s vehicle-forfeiture ordinance will not get a hearing. The denial leaves the lower court’s judgment in place. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor in questioning the constitutional reasoning behind the ruling.
Sotomayor wrote separately. Two unpaid parking tickets can be enough, in her description, for a driver to lose a vehicle. The city need not compensate owners, credit the forfeited vehicle’s value against their debts or return surplus proceeds from a sale, she wrote.
The petitioners, Ryan O’Donnell and Michael Goree, sued after Chicago impounded their vehicles.
According to their complaint, as recounted in Sotomayor’s statement, O’Donnell had three parking tickets totaling about $524. Goree had no tickets himself, but a co-signer on his vehicle owed about $560 in ticket debt involving another car.
The city added boot, towing and storage fees, then sold O’Donnell’s vehicle for $273 in scrap value and surrendered Goree’s vehicle to a lienholder. Neither man received compensation, the statement said.
The suit did not survive the district court, which dismissed it, or the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which affirmed it. The appeals court rejected the claim under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. It treated the ordinance as an exercise of Chicago’s traffic-enforcement authority.
Sotomayor kept the focus on how the ordinance operates. Under it, she wrote, Chicago can impound a vehicle that had nothing to do with the original violation. Forfeiture then follows the failure to pay, not the traffic infraction itself.
Those features suggest the city is collecting debt rather than enforcing public safety laws, according to her statement.
If so, Sotomayor wrote, the court’s 2023 decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County would seem to govern. That ruling involved the government’s failure to return surplus proceeds after a tax sale.
She said Chicago’s failure to compensate vehicle owners would likely violate the Takings Clause under that reasoning.
Still, Sotomayor agreed with declining review. Lower courts remain divided over how constitutional compensation requirements apply to government exercises of police power, and she favored allowing those questions to develop further.
She also cited the breadth of the lawsuit, which challenged the ordinance on its face and could reach provisions unrelated to vehicle forfeiture.
“I again encourage courts considering this issue to take care that due deference to state police powers does not eclipse constitutional rights.”
The court also denied review in Hadley v. South Bend and Pena v. Los Angeles, two cases her statement cited when describing the lower-court disagreements.
Four Justices Sit Out BMG Case
BMG Rights Management v. Vetter could not be decided by the full court. It lacked a quorum — Sotomayor, Gorsuch and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson took no part in considering the petition — and affirmed the lower court’s judgment.
Those who did participate concluded the case could not be heard and decided during the next term.
The order invoked a federal statute requiring affirmance in those circumstances, with the same effect as an affirmance by an equally divided court. It did not resolve the underlying dispute through a majority ruling on its merits.
Other Actions
The court declined review in Gwynne A. Wilcox v. Trump, Google LLC v. VirtaMove Corp. and Cemex Construction Materials Pacific v. National Labor Relations Board, without explaining those denials.
It also turned away Khalid S. Mohammad v. United States. Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not participate.
Justice Samuel Alito said he would have granted review in Hanaway v. Sanderson, but the court denied the petition.
In Burford German Funding v. Financialright Claims, the justices vacated the lower court’s judgment and returned the case to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court must reconsider it in light of Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties.
The court requested the solicitor general’s views in Bird v. Iowa Migrant Movement. That order sought the federal government’s position without granting or denying review.
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