Court Eyes Military Recruiting Law

High Court To Review Penalties For Schools That Bar Recruiters

(CBS/AP) 
The Bush administration's appeal has drawn the backing of Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., some law students and the Mountain States Legal Foundation, who argued in a friend-of-the-court filing that the court should defer to Congress on this matter.

In February, the House passed a nonbinding resolution on a 327-84 vote that expressed support for the law, which also denies defense-related funding to universities that don't provide ROTC programs.

When the Solomon Amendment was originally passed in 1994, many law schools opted to give military recruiters limited access. Harvard allowed the military on campus but declined to volunteer its career placement staff to arrange interviews. The University of Southern California, meanwhile, allowed recruiters to interview but didn't invite them to school-sponsored job fairs off campus.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the Pentagon began strictly enforcing the measure, demanding full recruitment access to campuses and threatening to pull funding if schools didn't comply. In summer 2003, Congress amended the Solomon Amendment to require equal access.

Since then, law schools have grudgingly complied but also filed lawsuits challenging the law. Earlier this year, a U.S. district judge in Bridgeport, Conn., ruled Yale Law School had a right to bar military recruiters from its job interview program, and similar cases were pending elsewhere.

The Supreme Court case is Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, 04-1152. Arguments will be heard in the court's next term beginning in October.

Also Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a pilot group's challenge to a federal rule forcing them to retire at age 60.

Justices let stand a lower ruling in favor of the Federal Aviation Administration, which says the retirement rule for commercial pilots is necessary for safety. Officials have argued that pilots lose critical cognitive and motor skills as they age.