This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 8th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Confirmation hearings begin next week for Sonia Sotomayor. Among the key cases

she'll be compelled to discuss the Ricci affirmative action decision. Cato Senior Fellow in

Constitutional Studies, Ilea Shapiro, comments.

What was the court asked to decide in the Ricci case?

Well, if you'll remember we discussed a few months earlier, this is the blockbuster case of a fairly lackluster term.

This is a reverse discrimination in promotion of firefighters at a New Haven.

The city commissioned an independent outside company to design

a race-neutral job-related test for promotion of firefighters to a captain and lieutenant.

And after running through this test of all the over 100 applicants, only certain whites and Hispanics were qualified for promotion.

The City Civil Service Board refused to certify these test results and therefore nobody got promoted after of course all

of these firefighters went through a lot of trouble and expense to study for and achieve

at these as I said again race-neutral job-related tests.

The city claimed that it was acting out of fear of a lawsuit by the black firefighters in refusing to certify

the results, that they would be sued under Title VII for a disparate impact claim, that

not enough blacks were getting promoted etc.

Instead what they got was a suit by the white and Hispanic firefighters who were denied

promotions.

Now the district court supported the city, granted them a judgment saying that they were following

Title VII and that was a valid reason for denying the promotions.

The Second Circuit on a panel that included Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court

Court nominee affirmed the district court in a short little

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