A federal judge has struck down a California law imposing racial and “gender identity” quotas on corporate boardrooms, finding such discrimination to be unconstitutional on its face.
Enacted in 2020, AB 979 required publicly-held corporations in the Golden State to have certain minimum numbers of board members from “underrepresented groups,” with the exact number depending on the corporation’s size. Violations would be punishable by fines ranging from $100,000 to $300,000.
a group calling itself the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment sued over the law, arguing it violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” and a federal statute taking equal protection to mean that individuals enjoy “the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts […and] the full and equal benefit of all laws.”
However, the state’s Democrat leaders tend to have less luck when their actions draw the attention of federal courts.