Following up on my post last week about Texas’s cert. opposition brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, I wanted to highlight Texas’s status updates on the two plaintiffs – and the unconventional sources of authority it relies on to give those updates.
In my original post on Fisher, I wrote that the two plaintiffs – Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz – “should be graduating soon from other colleges.” That expectation was based on the facts that neither student professed interest in transferring to the University of Texas at Austin and that, in the normal course of things, they would now be college seniors.
To bolster its argument that the plaintiffs’ forward-looking claims are now moot, Texas dug a little deeper. So where are they now?
Texas reports that “Fisher is now nearly halfway through her senior year at LSU.” To support that assertion, Texas cites to – what else? – the LSU Bowling Club’s online roster, which lists an “Abigail Fisher” from Sugarland, Texas, as a senior. The take-away: Google-stalking has a place in law practice.
And what about Fisher’s co-plaintiff, Rachel Michalewicz? Her name mysteriously disappeared from the case when it reached the Supreme Court. According to Texas, “it takes little imagination to understand her absence.” Texas asserts that “Michalewicz has already graduated from college, [so] including her as a co-petitioner would only highlight the [mootness] problem with this petition.”
How did Texas find out she’d already graduated? Facebook, of course. Michalewicz’s publicly available Facebook information reveals that she graduated from St. Edward’s University in Austin in three years and is now a law student at SMU. Research tells me that this is the first time a Supreme Court filing has cited to a Facebook profile.
