A federal appeals court last week declined to rehear a case over a lawsuit challenging a Hawaii private school’s policy of serving only native Hawaiian students.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, had earlier ruled that the four challengers to the restrictive admissions policy of the Kamehameha Schools could not remain anonymous. Lawyers for the challengers argued that the students faced threats because of the suit.
The private, multicampus Kamehameha Schools’ policy of admitting only native Hawaiians has faced numerous lawsuits. In 2006, the same federal appellate court upheld the admission policy against a challenge under federal civil rights laws.
Native Hawaiians are defined as those having any ancestry that can be traced to the indigenous population before the first landfall of Westerners in 1778.
