The Department of Justice announced an investigation into the University of California system, saying its policy of valuing diversity in hiring could run against the Civil Rights Act.

On Thursday, the DOJ sent a letter to Dr. Michael Drake, the president of the university. The DOJ said it was investigating whether or not the hiring plan laid out in the UC 2030 Capacity Plan violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII is meant to protect potential hires from being denied a job based on protected classes like race, sex or religion.

“Public employers are bound by federal laws that prohibit racial and other employment discrimination,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “Institutional directives that use race- and sex-based hiring practices expose employers to legal risk under federal law.”

READ MORE: DEI Policies Go Against 1964 Civil Rights Act, DOJ Warns

The 2030 Capacity Plan addresses both enrollment goals and faculty hiring. One of its goals is “reflecting California’s racial/ethnic diversity.”

“Faculty are the backbone to the University of California – they create highly ranked academic programs, develop the curriculum, and produce research that yields important discoveries and scholarly works,” the plan reads. “For UC to remain excellent, it must grow and diversify its faculty. The University is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty, both underrepresented minorities and female faculty.”

To fulfill this goal, UC says it started the Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) program with both state funding and funding that came directly from the UC president’s office.

“AFD identifies best practices in equity opportunity hiring by providing competitive awards to campus pilots testing new interventions aimed at increasing faculty diversity and improving academic climate and faculty retention,” the plan reads.

Though the plan cites diverse hiring as a goal, it does not lay out how exactly this is being accomplished. The only other reference to the program is in the section about UC San Diego specifically, where it says the campus is “actively involved” in AFD, “and has already invested in 28 new [full-time equivalent programs], half in a cohort on STEM impacts on the Black diaspora and half on Latinx/Chicanx experience in Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Though the DOJ alleges the 2030 Capacity Plan “directs its campuses to hire ‘diverse’ faculty members to meet race- and sex-based employment quotas,” the UC website makes no mention of such quotas. UC describes its AFD program as awarding “competitive grants to faculty project leads on all ten campuses in two priority areas: recruitment and improving climate & retention.”

This is just the latest in the Trump DOJ’s fight against “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or DEI policies, often using the Civil Rights Act as a cudgel. Though the landmark Act was meant to help qualified women and people of color find work they’d been shut out of before, many right-wing pundits claim it’s resulted in white men being blocked out of jobs.

A number of studies—including three from the National Bureau of Economic Research—show this claim is unfounded, according to The Oregonian. These studies, each published in the last six years, say white people are still more likely to be hired than people of color.

“We thought if we’re going to see [a preference for female or minority candidates] anywhere, we’re going to see it in these prestigious employers who tell us up and down they’re trying to hire for diversity,” Wharton economist Corinne Low told the paper. “We see either no preference, or we actually see a penalty toward female and minority candidates.”

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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday morning that South Carolina had the right to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding, a decision that Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared to the Jim Crow era.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic was over a South Carolina executive order that prohibited the public use of funds to go towards abortion. In July 2018, the state decided that providing Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood ran afoul of the EO and cut it.

A patient, Julie Edwards, and Planned Parenthood sued the state, claiming the state was in violation of the 1965 law that created Medicaid. The Medicaid law called for states use funding so “any individual eligible for medical assistance . . . may obtain [it] from any [provider] qualified to perform the service . . . who undertakes to provide [it]”.

READ MORE: Progressive Group to Launch $10 Million Campaign Focused on SCOTUS Reforms

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court rejected this argument. The case ultimately hinged on Section 1983 of Title 42 of the US Code of Law. That law says that anyone has the right to sue if their civil rights are violated. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that Edwards had no standing to bring the case.

“[T]he decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others. And private enforcement actions, meritorious or not, can force governments to direct money away from public services and spend it instead on litigation,” Gorsuch wrote. “The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, arguing that the case stretched section 1983 to its breaking point.

“The “scant resemblance” between §1983 today and §1983 as it was traditionally understood creates good reason to doubt our modern understanding,” Thomas wrote.

Justice Brown’s dissent, however, compared the case to cases brought during the Jim Crow era—or rather, the lack thereof.

“Like other §1983 skeptics, JUSTICE THOMAS seems to view the paucity of early §1983 lawsuits as evidence that the statute was originally understood to do very little. But other explanations come to mind, too—such as the fact that filing civil rights lawsuits during the Jim Crow era could be quite perilous, especially for the people whom the statute was originally meant to benefit. Many would-be plaintiffs had reason to fear that filing a lawsuit would lead to physical or economic reprisals,” Brown wrote. “Add to that the difficulty of finding a lawyer, prevailing before often-hostile juries, and (if successful) enforcing a judgment, and it is not hard to imagine that the dearth of §1983 lawsuits in the wake of Reconstruction might have myriad alternative explanations.”

Thursday’s ruling could have wide-ranging effects, allowing other states the ability to block Medicaid funds from not just Planned Parenthood but other providers.

“Even though the state is trying to claim that it has sole authority to decide who’s a qualified provider, this isn’t really about whether Planned Parenthood is a qualified provider. It’s about a political calculation on abortion,” Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told The Guardian. “Really, what’s happening here is states making politically driven decisions about access to medical care.”

Due to author JK Rowling’s hateful anti-trans crusades, The Booksmith in San Francisco has given Harry Potter the boot from its shelves.

Though Rowling has used her wealth and platform to push transphobia for a while now, the final straw for the Booksmith was when she announced the “JK Rowling Women’s Fund,” which offers legal funding to “individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.” (“Sex-based rights” is used as a dogwhistle in trans-exclusionary circles.)

The Booksmith now has a sign on its shelves saying that it has decided it cannot support Rowling.

“As a group of queer booksellers, we also had our adolescents shaped by wizards and elves. Look at us, it’s obvious. If you or someone you love wants to dive into the world of Harry Potter, we suggest doing so by buying used copies of these books,” the sign reads.

READ MORE: J. K. Rowling Compares ‘Transgender Hormone Therapy to Gay Conversion Therapy’

A slightly longer version of the statement appears on the Booksmith’s website, which includes a list of potential alternatives to Rowling’s series.

“Or, even better, please find below a list of bookseller-curated suggestions for books we genuinely love that also might fit the HP brief for you and yours. Many are series; some are standalone,” the site reads. “Happy reading, solidarity forever.”

The suggestions include the Morrigan Crow series by Jessica Townsend, the Earthsea books by science fiction legend Ursula K. LeGuin and The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy.

Booksmith co-owner Camden Avery told The San Francisco Standard why the store has stopped carrying the books.

“There’s a direct throughline between what [Rowling’s] doing with the money she’s making on book sales as a living author who’s still collecting royalties, and something that, frankly, harms us and our trans siblings and people that we care about in our community,” he said.

“Some people are like, ‘Enough with the politics. Just be a bookstore,’” Avery added. “But we don’t have the luxury of pretending anymore that anything that we do is not related to this political moment, this imperialist, fascist regime that we’re trying to survive.”

Though there were hints before, Rowling’s public transphobia became a large part of her online presence starting in 2020 when she wrote an essay claiming trans activists were specifically trying to “erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.” She’s used her wealth and power to fund anti-trans activism—including a long campaign to get the UK government to exclude trans women from the legal definition of “woman.” The UK Supreme Court ruled trans women weren’t covered by the 2010 Equality Act this April.

Her transphobia has turned previous friends and allies against her. Most recently, that includes out gay actor Stephen Fry, who read the audiobook version of the Harry Potter series. Last week, Fry spoke out against her, calling her a “lost cause.”

“She seemed to wake up or kick a hornet’s nest of transphobia which has been entirely destructive. I disagree profoundly with her on this subject. I am angry she does not disavow some of the more revolting and truly horrible, violently destructive things that people say. She does not attack those at all,” Fry said.

The stars of the original Harry Potter film series, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, have also cut ties with the author over her transphobic views.

“To the person who said they like me best when I am not ranting about politics: I like me best when I am not ignoring fascism,” Watson said on Instagram following the UK Supreme Court Equality Act ruling.

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