BBC NEWS | Americas | Court reverses Sotomayor decision

Political correctness. How sad it makes me. And what on earth did Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean?
Last time I checked this wasn't about vested rights - it was about not breaking the proper channels for promotion by discarding results out of ideological concerns.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

I really don't give a flying frog turd what colour you are as long as you are the best qualified for the job.

Every fight is a food fight to a cannibal. - Demetri Martin

I can't see the difficulty in recognizing that the guys who knew their jobs, techniques and practices actually passed the exam. Isn't that one of the reasons for having exams? Racist thoughts should never have even been considered as an argument.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, just like grandpa. Not screaming and panicking like his passengers.
Don't drink and drive from The Lancre Tavern

Such quota policies are always a discussable subject, but as far as I know, if you do practice them, it has to be put down somewhere as a reliable rule instead of being applied on a whim.

Here, those are usually gender quotas. For example, the most often practiced form is the "soft quota", where the guidelines for employing people in public offices, for example university chairs, are meant to be given out to the female candidate if there are a female and a male candidate who are equally qualified. This is supposed to work against the "glass ceiling", against structures that result in, say, 90% of professors of a certain rank still being male in a field of study where 60% of the graduates are female.

And then there's the hard quota, which I know only from certain political committees, where the practice is that if there are no female candidates who can fill a certain quota, the posts in question remain empty until this changes. I haven't seen that one in quite along time because they become more and more redundant in many areas, which would be the ideal process.

As I said, these measures are debatable, but the point is, there should be rules in advance, you can't just pull it out of your pocket after the exams have been taken and passed and you just don't agree with the result. I may have overread something, but if there wasn't any previously established set of guidelines at all - could there be more local politics at work, for example some sort of intern or regional feud?

"Hoher Sinn liegt oft im kindischen Spiel." (Friedrich Schiller)

From the article, it is stated that New Haven officials were afraid to be sued, and the unstated and implied undertone of the case is that New Haven officials were afraid to be sued by black or Hispanic firefighters, who would have claimed that the city promoted an overwhelmingly white group due to racial discrimination.

Keep in mind that such lawsuits, regardless of their actual merit or justification, produce a lot of attention, both locally and from the media, and the situation could soon grow out of proportion and be overblown if the courts consider them even remotely worth looking into.

Hence my reference to PC. If a merit-based exam produces results that can be advertised as racism, and against equal opportunity employment laws, in an environment that avoids not actual racism but rather the outward appearance of racism, we thus end up in a situation where an official municipal body decides to dump the results rather than face the possible backlash, actively undermining the existing promotion process and effectively practicing discrimination against a demographic whose objections aren't likely to cause the same hassle.

Only they did cause a hassle.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

Race issues regarding employment usually end up with the double edge sword syndrome. You hire the qualified white males and your blasted for choosing white over another race. If you hire the qualified the hispanic or black males because they are black/hispanic then your blasted for choosing black/hispanic over another race.
I agree the glass ceiling needs to be shattered, however I think Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have chosen her words more carefully.

Time flies like an arrow
Fruit flies prefer a banana