The Supreme Court’s decision in R (on the application of E) v Governing Body of JFS [2009] UKSC 15, [2009] All ER (D) 163 (Dec) provides a fine example of the law of unintended consequences.
The Supreme Court’s decision in R (on the application of E) v Governing Body of JFS [2009] UKSC 15, [2009] All ER (D) 163 (Dec) provides a fine example of the law of unintended consequences.
When in 1976 the newly enacted Race Relations Act prohibited, for purposes specified in the Act, discrimination on “racial grounds” (s 1(1)) and provided that such grounds included “ethnic…origins” (s 3(1)), nobody could have imagined that those words would be held, 33 years later, to preclude Jewish schools from applying, in their admission policies, Orthodox Judaism’s age-old test for determining whether a child is Jewish. Yet that is precisely what the majority of the Supreme Court have decided.
The result produces an anomaly, and a discriminatory one at that. Like all other faith schools, Jewish schools remain free to give preference in their admission
