This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 30, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the Supreme Court case of Ricci versus DiStefano, racial preferences in hiring and promotions

are once again at stake.

Gilius Shapiro, Cato Institute Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, and editor of Cato's

Supreme Court Review details the case.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut wanted to promote firefighters.

They needed new captains and lieutenants.

So they conducted a neutral test. They hired an out-of-state third-party company that

specializes in producing all sorts of exams for firefighters among other people

to test people a promotion exam

and the results were that the people eligible for promotion based on the civil service rules were all white and Hispanic.

There were no blacks who were eligible after the result of this exam for promotion in the fire department.

The City Civil Service Board decided not to certify the results of this exam, decided not to promote anybody.

After considering various political developments,

the local Al Sharpton came out and said that there would be trouble if they went ahead with this.

So ultimately the board just decided, okay, we're not going to promote anybody.

They also feared being sued by the black firefighters under a disparate impact suit under civil rights law title seven.

Instead they got a suit from the white and Hispanic firefighters.

I mean this is not rocket science what's going to happen here under the very plausible

theory that their equal protection rights under the Constitution were violated

in that they were denied a promotion solely because of of their race.

Now the Cato Institute filed a brief in the case.

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