I've been reading the SCOTUS decision on Ricci v. DeStefano.  I'm not all the way through it, but it looks like the court basically said that unequal outcomes are necessary to show bias, but not sufficient to show bias.  You do not have to convince any educators of that, duh.  Conservatives have been arguing that this counts against Sotomayor because she was one of the judges that decided the case in a lower court.  I'm not sure about that given that she was only one of the judges involved.   But, I am absolutely sure that if conservatives are going to hang their hats on the idea that unequal outcomes are insufficient to show bias then there are at least two issues about which they are going to have to shut up about if they are to have a logically consistent and principled, rather than partisian, position on bias and discrimination: (1) liberal bias in higher education based solely on the unequal ratio of Democrats and Republicans among faculty and (2) the naturalistic bias in the natural sciences.  The inequality of these outcomes is insufficient to show bias against conservatives or intelligent design theorists in education.