JAG CENTRAL

From the NY Times, news that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari to FAIR v. Rumsfeld, the Third Circuit case holding unconstitutional the law pulling federal funding from those law schools who refuse to allow military recruiters on campus:

The justices announced that they would review a lower-court ruling, in favor of 25 law schools, that universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal aid. Arguments will be heard in the justices' next term, which begins in October.

At issue is a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, which held in a 2-to-1 decision last Nov. 29 that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to bar military recruiters to protest a Defense Department policy that discriminates against gay people by barring them from serving openly in the armed forces.

The controversy began in 1995, when Congress passed what became known as the Solomon Amendment to a military appropriations bill. Named for its sponsor, Representative Gerald B.H. Solomon, an upstate New York Republican, the measure barred disbursement of money from the Departments of Defense, Transportation, Health and Human Services and Education, as well as some other agencies, to any college or university that blocked campus recruiting by the military.

As Mr. Solomon put it at the time: "Tell recipients of federal money at colleges and universities that if you do not like the armed forces, if you do not like its policies, that is fine, that is your First Amendment right. But do not expect federal dollars to support your interference with our military recruiters."

The cert. grant is contained on page 8 of today's order list. The SCOTUSBlog writes about the cert. grant here. You can get the Third Circuit's opinion here. The Georgetown University Law Center has a running repository of FAIR v. Rumsfeld litigation here. NOTE: The Centrist was a contributing author to the UCLAW Veterans Society's amicus brief in support of the US Government, which you can find here.

UPDATE: Phil Carter blogs at length about the cert. grant here. As Phil puts it:

Ultimately, I think the long-term answer to reversing this policy and promoting tolerance within the military is to encourage graduates from those (small "l") liberal universities now fighting the Solomon Amendment to enter the armed forces. They will take with them the values they learned at places like Harvard, Columbia and UCLA, and change attitudes more surely than any act of Congress or Supreme Court opinion. This litigation may serve as a valuable symbolic protest, but I fear that in the long run, it does grave harm both to the military and to the cause for which these professors are fighting.