STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE:  All in all, 20 “friend of the court” briefs have been filed urging the Supreme Court to grant review of the case about Harvard’s race-preferential admissions (including one by Peter Kirsanow and me).  Another one of the briefs–filed by Californians for Equal Rights–was based on an article written by Alex Heideman and me, so I’ve got a double stake in this.  I’m crossing my fingers.  I hope you are too.

Here is a list of the briefs.

LOUIS K. BONHAM:  “UT Austin Approves Orwellian ‘Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity.”

“HERE I STAND. I CAN DO NO OTHER”: Yesterday was the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s dramatic refusal to recant his “heresies” at the Diet of Worms. His words—“Here I stand. I can do no other”—are perhaps the Protestant Reformation’s most riveting.

Alas, it’s possible they were never actually uttered. They don’t appear in the contemporary records of the event. But, to me, that seems beside the point.  Luther gets full credit either way:  He lived the words.

The “Diet” was a heresy trial of sorts, called in the free imperial city of Worms by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Months earlier Pope Leo X had issued the Exsurge Domine (“Arise, O Lord”), a papal bull that condemned the many “errors” of Luther’s 95 Theses. The Diet was called to enforce Leo’s bull.

Luther refused to be intimidated. He did, however, apologize for the harshness of some of his words. Like many 16^th century Germans, Luther had a penchant for the scatological. His writings were sprinkled with references to farts, excrement, and the bodily parts that produce them. That can make his writing seem less than inspiring to modern readers. (And, yes, he had an assortment of other prejudices that wouldn’t go over well today… it was another time and place.) On the other hand, his concern over corruption in the Roman Catholic Church was both sincere and important. No fair-minded person could disagree with him completely.

By standing by his beliefs, Luther was putting his life on the line. In theory, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, had secured from the Emperor a guarantee of safe passage for Luther both coming and going from the Diet. Yet Luther knew the same promise had been made to Jan Hus a century earlier under similar circumstances. Hus had been nevertheless burned at the stake as a heretic.

In May, the Emperor issued the Edict of Worms: “[W]e forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic ….” Luther had to be hidden away for a time.

Twenty-first century America is certainly a different time and place. We have our own issues. Mercifully, being a dissenter doesn’t require the same kind of courage it did in the 16^th century.

On the things that matter, here we stand, fellow Instapundit readers. There’s not much excuse for failing to speak up.

THE RIGHT WAY AND THE WRONG WAY TO FIX A PROBLEM: In this article, I discuss the evidence that race-preferential admissions have made it harder, rather than easier, for African American law students to graduate and pass the bar. One solution to this problem would be to stop discriminating on the basis of race and admit what should have been obvious: students aren’t being done any favors when they are admitted to a school at which they aren’t academically competitive. But several states are experimenting with a different “solution”: dumb down the bar exam.

JOHN FUND:  What do Black Lives Matter and Hunter Biden have in common?  Big Tech won’t let you read criticisms of either of them.

DISPARATE IMPACT: The poisonous doctrine that disparate impact based on race is the legal and moral equivalent of actual race discrimination is everywhere these days.   This article explains how supposedly conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger got us there.

GREAT STORY:  The Forger From Berne:  Between 1940 and 1944 a clandestine network of Polish diplomats and their Jewish partners in Switzerland created illegal Latin American passports that saved thousands of lives.  Half of the documents were forged by one person–Polish Vice consul in Berne Konstanty Rokicki.

THANK YOU, IDAHO LEGISLATURE!!: Idaho House Rejects Higher Ed Budget Due to Concerns Over Wokeism.

ON THIS DAY IN 1994: The Rwandan genocide began.

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE: The Biden Administration’s czarina of racial equity, Catherine Lhamon, continues to express surprise that students diagnosed with behavioral disabilities are disciplined in school more than students without such disabilities … and that African American students are disciplined more often than other students. But data show that there is a good and obvious reason for this.

I’m figuring the Biden Administration will be reinstating the Obama Administration’s (in my view illegal) school discipline policy any minute now.

IT’S HISTORIC: On this day in 1930, the Twinkie was invented by bakery manager James Dewar in Schiller Park, Illinois.  As is so often the case, capacity was the mother of invention.  The machinery for making cream-filled strawberry shortcake was unused when strawberries were out of season.  Twinkies (which were originally banana cream filled) were the off-season solution.

WORLD ENDS TONIGHT, WOMEN AND MINORITIES TO SUFFER MOST: Catherine Lhamon, the former Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and now Biden’s “Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity,” was quoted by ABC News a few days ago: “[P]ollution and the climate crisis disproportionately threaten the lives and livelihoods of Americans of color.”

Maybe. But a 2016 report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights tried to prove exactly that, and ended up with data that showed just the opposite: The pollution it found was disproportionately in white areas. Of course, the Commission proceeded to ignore its own data.

CUTE LITTLE HERO: Four-year-old honored by Texas police officers for helping to save his toddler cousin from drowning.  The more heroes are honored (even the pint-sized ones), the more of them we’ll get.

COMING SOON:  A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Maimon Schwarzschild and Gail Heriot, contains essays by John Ellis, Peter Kirsanow, Heather Mac Donald, Peter Wood and others (including your humble editors). It should be available for your reading pleasure by late May.

THE OTHER BERNSTEIN: On this day in 1922, a great American composer and conductor named Bernstein was born. No, not Leonard.  Elmer.  And no, they’re not related.

Elmer Bernstein wrote the scores for The Ten Commandments (1956), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), The Great Escape (1963), Animal House (1978), Ghostbusters (1984) and many other movies.

By far the most important to me is the theme for The Magnificent Seven (1960). (If you haven’t seen the movie, you might remember it as the theme music for the Marlboro Man ad campaign of the 1960s).

When I cook, I sometimes play it. I like a little drama with my cooking.

JOHN FUND:  Biden Aims to Outshine Obama as a Progressive Reformer.

SOUTH DAKOTA HAS A NEW STAND YOUR GROUND LAW:  And so do several other states.  Is the hysteria over these laws dying down?  (Here’s my take from last year.)

SOUTH CAROLINA REPUBLICANS ARE JOINING DEMOCRATS IN BACKING STRATEGY THAT WILL THROW SEVERELY DISABLED WORKERS OUT OF THEIR JOBS: Here’s why it’s a bad idea.

HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Many of you have now read about the bizarre mistreatment of conservative law professor Tom Smith by my very own university. If you haven’t, it’s worth reading about.

Here’s the basic story: In response to demands by student activists, Tom is now officially “under investigation” for what the dean has termed “offensive language in reference to people from China.” Some of the students are calling for him to be fired. What Tom actually did is criticize the Chinese government, not the Chinese people.  The dean’s insulting missive to the university community was just a silly misinterpretation.

Weirdly, even the students concede that Tom was referring to the Chinese government. Their argument is that by criticizing the Chinese government, Tom is adding fuel to the supposed Anti-Asian fire and thus putting them at risk.

This morning our local paper—the San Diego Union Tribune—published three op-eds on the Smith Affair. Yes, that’s one, two, three op-eds. If you have the time and the inclination, please feel free to leave a comment after one of the op-eds. I feel certain that woke USD officials do not spend a lot of time reading Instapundit. (That’s their loss.) But I bet they will be reading the comments at the San Diego Union Tribune.

THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Hot off the press– The Defeat of Proposition 16 in California and Mr. Dooley: Should the Supreme Court Take Notice of “Th’ Iliction Returns” Next Time It Addresses Race-Preferential Admissions Policies?

(This article formed the basis of the argument in the Amicus Curiae Brief submitted yesterday by Californians for Equal Rights in the Harvard case.)

APRIL FOOL:  Washington Post surprised to learn that federal bailouts disproportionately go the politically well connected:  “Some of America’s Wealthiest Hospital Systems Ended Up Even Richer Thanks to Federal Bailouts.”

I’M GETTING USED TO THIS KIND OF STUFF:  COVID, murder hornets, riots, the Suez Canal … and now Johnson & Johnson factory mistake ruins 15 million doses of vaccine.

HOT OFF THE PRESS!:  Amicus Curiae briefs in support of the Petitioner are due today at the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.  Here the brief Peter Kirsanow and I filed.  Cross your fingers for SFFA.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS LAW SCHOOL’S FIRST AMENDMENT CENTER:  Standing up for the First Amendment … unless it would p*ss off the wrong people.

GOOD TO KNOW:  Apparently, having more women and “people of color” as traffic engineers is the No. 1 way to prevent pedestrian traffic fatalities.  In Bloomberg today, a UConn law professor argues:  “First, we need to diversify the people who codify road design.  [The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials], the code councils and the federal agency writing the [Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices] are dominated by white, male engineers who are trained to prioritize driver speed.  We need women, people of color, transit users and bike-pedestrian advocates to bring new perspectives and cultural competencies into the conversation.”