BRANCHING OUT

Anti-Affirmative Action Group Now Suing U.S. Naval Academy Too

Students for Fair Admissions recently launched a similar case against West Point.

A group suing West Point over the consideration of race in its admissions filed a similar lawsuit Thursday against the U.S. Naval Academy. The case from the Students for Fair Admissions nonprofit seeks to prevent the academy from taking applicants’ race into account during student admissions. “The Naval Academy has no legal justification for treating midshipman applicants differently by race and ethnicity,” the group’s founder, Edward Blum, said in a statement. The lawsuit alleges that the current admissions practices are discriminatory and breached the principle of equal protection in the Fifth Amendment. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated policies used by colleges to boost the number of minority students admitted, but the decision did not address the consideration of race in military academies’ admissions, which Chief Justice John Roberts said held “potentially distinct interests.”