Global Courant
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has come under scrutiny for making a flawed claim about black infant mortality among white doctors in her dissent on last week’s landmark affirmative action decision.
Jackson sought to demonstrate that racial admissions is a matter of life and death for racial minorities, and her dissent in the Supreme Court ruling on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard cited an example. The law firm apparently responsible for the misleading statement attempted to “clarify” the claim on Friday.
Try to show that Since race was fair in admission and realizes equality, Jackson argued in her dissenting opinion that diversity “saves lives” and is essential for “marginalized communities.” She claimed that diversity is for the “improvement” of students and society as a whole beyond college campuses.
“For high-risk black newborns, having a black doctor doubles the chance that the baby will live and not die,” Jackson wrote as an example.
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is under investigation for her dissent in a landmark decision rejecting affirmative action. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
That claim came from an amicus brief filed by attorneys representing an association of medical colleges. The letter stated that for “high-risk black newborns, having a black doctor is like a panacea; it more than doubles the chance that the baby will live,” citing a 2020 study that examined the neonatal mortality rates in Florida between 1992 and 2015.
In a letter filed with the Supreme Court on Friday, Norton Rose Fulbright wrote that the argument Jackson cited in her opinion “justifies clarification” and sought to clear up any “confusion.”
“The main finding cited from the (study) was that the death rate for black newborns, compared to white newborns, decreased by more than half under the supervision of a black physician,” the law firm’s letter said. “In absolute terms, this study found that patient-physician racial concordance led to a reduction in health inequality.”
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However, the letter continued, while survival and mortality may be opposites and reduced mortality generally indicates higher survival, “statistically they are not interchangeable. Thus, the statement in the (amicus letter) deserves clarification.”
Still, the lawyer added that the study nevertheless supports Jackson’s argument in its dissenting opinion, expressing “sorry” for “any confusion” that may have been caused by the letter’s statement.
The letter to the Supreme Court added that a “more accurate” summary of the 2020 study’s findings would have been to say that “having a black doctor reduces the risk of death for black newborns by more than half in compared to white newborns.”
In other words, Jackson’s claim that having a black doctor “more than doubles the chance that the baby will survive” could be misleading, because the study on which that statement is based examined lower mortality rates, which is not the same . statistically as survival.
Norton Rose Fulbright’s letter came after Jackson’s statement in her dissenting opinion attracted the attention of several legal experts.
The Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to end affirmative action in college admissions. (Collection of the United States Supreme Court via Getty Images)
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Ted Frank, a senior attorney at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, responded directly to Jackson’s claim, berating justice for making a math error.
“A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible,” wrote Frank, who submitted an amicus brief in support of Students for Fair Admissions. “Imagine 40% of black newborns died — thousands of dead babies every week. Yet that is a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%. How could Judge Jackson such an innumerable mistake?”
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Frank further argued that the 2020 study was “flawed” and inconsistent with Jackson’s claim that black newborns have a significantly higher chance of survival with a black doctor.
The study makes no such claims. It examines Florida newborn mortality rates between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (although no statistically significant improvement for black midwives),” Frank wrote.
“So we have a Supreme Court judge repeating a mathematically absurd claim that stems from the mischaracterization of a flawed study by an interested party. Her opinion then urges ‘all of us’ to ‘do some evidence and experts tell us what is needed to level the playing field’ and march forward together.’ Instead, we have to watch where we’re going.”
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a Fox News contributor, used Frank’s op-ed and Jackson’s opinion to argue in a blog post Friday that it could be problematic when various advocacy groups file waves of amicus briefs on Supreme Court cases that support one side or the other by pushing studies and other data that the justices use in their arguments.
“My objection to the order is that the judges are in a poor position to judge the veracity or accuracy of such studies,” Turley wrote. “They simply choose between rival studies to claim a definitive factual basis for an opinion.
“When you’re in the Supreme Court, anyone is free to just dump statistics and studies on file, and the court regularly uses such material to determine the outcome.
A protester demonstrates outside the Supreme Court in Washington on June 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
“It creates more of a legislative environment for the court as different parties enter data to support their own views on what constitutes better policy or a more serious societal problem. There is only limited ability of parties to challenge such data given the limited time and space in briefing. As a result, major decisions or disagreements can be based on highly contentious claims of fact. In this case, critics believe that the Jackson argument is literally wrong.”
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The Supreme Court ended affirmative action on June 29 in a landmark 6-3 decision. The case combined lawsuits brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina by the student activist group Students for Fair Admissions, which argued that the schools’ admissions programs discriminated against Asian applicants in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act’s clause, respectively. equal protection of the 14th amendment.
“A benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to take on a leadership role or achieve a particular goal should be linked to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
Aaron Kliegman is a political reporter for Fox News Digital.
