Hearing held in ACSI v. Stearns (Fundy Schools v. UC)

I have written several articles about the ACSI v. Stearns case. Here is an update I just got from ACSI:

On February 14, 2008, a federal judge in Los Angeles held a hearing on requests by both sides for Summary Judgment in the viewpoint discrimination case that ACSI and Calvary Chapel, of Murrieta, California, filed almost three years ago against the university system . . . The hearing lasted more than two hours as the judged asked each side a series of probing questions. It was clear from the questions that the judge was very familiar with the hundreds of pages of materials. Our attorneys have spent many hours reviewing the approximately 350,000 pages of materials [!] produced by the University of California as they prepared for the hearing. To read the brief our attorneys filed for the summary hearing and the plaintiff’s statement of facts, go to www.acsi.org/~UCcase. There you will also find a brief by five Catholic law school professors supporting our case.

Also, I asked why there was the possibility of a jury trial in the case, considering that the Constitution guarantees a jury trial only when the plaintiff seeks relief of monetary value. An ACSI attorney gave this response:
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While there is no request for a monetary relief and the issues involve constitutional matters, I believe that a jury will be used to decide issues of fact. This may include special interrogatories (questions) presented by the court to the jury to decide. In addition, I would anticipate the jury would likely apply some of those facts to the jury instructions and reach other conclusions, ultimately the court will decide the questions of law.

The lawsuit was filed in August 2005, to be precise. The case should have been through the federal appeals court and maybe even the Supreme Court by now. The courts are just getting slower and slower -- for example, in Selman v. Cobb County, an appeals court took 16 months just to vacate and remand the district court decision because of missing evidence (Cobb County eventually took a dive by settling out of court). As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.

The ACSI lawsuit concerns textbooks and course outlines in several subjects, including non-science subjects -- I will concentrate here on the biology course. UC originally objected to the physics textbook because this textbook contains quotations from the bible, but UC may have dropped its objection to this textbook.

Because UC does not accept the fundy schools' textbooks, the fundy school students are expected to apply under the special admission program requiring them to be in the top 2-4% of high school grads instead of applying under the general admission program requiring them to be in the top 12.5-15%. That's ridiculous.

Here is how I think the court should rule, at least so far as the biology course is concerned:

(1) Because the fundy biology textbooks' approach -- based on an assumption that the bible is infallible -- is unorthodox, UC applicants claiming credit for the fundy biology course should be required to either (1) get a satisfactory score on the SAT AP Biology Test or (2) take a general biology course in college.

(2) The judge should rule that the evolution controversy is nonjusticiable.[1][2].

(3) The judge should reject a "Monday-morning battle of experts" who advised neither UC nor the plaintiffs. See Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 595-596. Judge Jones made the mistake of having a "Monday-morning battle of the experts" in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and now that mistake is being repeated in ACSI v. Stearns, which has a whole big bunch of expert witnesses.

Because the courts waste so much time on high-profile cases, low-profile cases are given short shrift. In my federal-court lawsuit against California and the US EPA over the grossly unconstitutional California "smog impact fee" (eventually thrown out by the state courts), California claimed federal-court immunity under the 11th amendment and the Tax Injunction Act. I argued that the state lost its immunity by "leaving the sphere that was exclusively its own" (Parden v. Terminal Railway of the Alabama State Docks Dept.) when the state based the smog impact fee entirely upon the state's special status under federal auto-emissions laws and regulations. California did not even attempt to rebut that argument but that dunghill Judge TJ "Mad" Hatter dismissed my suit without an oral hearing and without an opinion! I was later vindicated when a former top California air-quality official testified in state court that the fee required the approval of the US EPA.
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