Lawsuit Against Wilson, UC Regents Over Affirmative Action Can Proceed
The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to review a lower court ruling granting a UC Santa Barbara student and the ACLU the right to sue Gov. Pete Wilson and the University of California Board of Regents seeking to overturn their year-old ban on affirmative action.
The lawsuit alleges that the governor’s private telephone conversations with several regents before they met to vote on the ban last July were in effect a “serial meeting” of the board in violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act which requires that, with few exceptions, the regents meet in public.
“The case is alive,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, and depositions of regents and the governor should begin soon.
Wilson and the regents have argued for months that the lawsuit should be dismissed because a 30-day statute of limitations had expired. But a San Francisco Superior Court judge rejected that argument. Lawyers for the governor and the regents appealed to the state Court of Appeal, then the state Supreme Court, but were rebuffed.
“What’s happened so far is preliminary skirmishing,” Rosenbaum said. “Now we’re going to have the main event: regent-gate.”
Lawyers for Wilson and the regents maintain they violated no laws.
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