Supreme Court on Voting Rights October 9, 2014 WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday stopped officials in Wisconsin from requiring voters there to provide photo identification before casting their ballots in the coming election. Three of the court’s more conservative members dissented, saying they would have allowed officials to require identification. The requirement, one of the strictest in the nation, is part of a state law enacted in 2011 but mostly blocked by various courts in the interim. A federal trial judge had blocked it, saying it would “deter or prevent a substantial number of the 300,000-plus registered voters who lack ID from voting,” disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic voters. The law was provisionally reinstated last month by a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Chicago just hours after it heard arguments in the case. The full court was deadlocked, five to five, on a request for a new hearing. “It is simply impossible, as a matter of common sense and of logistics, that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters will both learn about the need for photo identification and obtain the requisite identification in the next 36 days,” the appeals court judges opposed to the requirement wrote. The three-judge panel issued a decision on Monday upholding the law, reasoning that it was similar to one from Indiana that the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. Read the question and please scan or photo your working, accurate answer only. Problem 13-14 a. A stock has an annual return of 11.2 percent and a standard deviation of 45 percent. What is the smallest expected gain over the next year with a probability of 1 percent? (Round your answer to 2 decimal places. Omit the "%" sign in your response.)   Problem 13-19 Consider the following information for a mutual fund, the market index, and the risk-free rate. You also know that the return correlation between the fund and the market is 0.95. Year Fund Market Risk-Free 2008 -15.13 % -25.5 % 2 % 2009 25.1 19.6 4 2010 12.5 9.7 2 2011 6.4 7.6 4 2012 -1.26 -2.2 3 What are the Sharpe and Treynor ratios for the fund? (Round your answer to 4 decimal places.) Problem 13-20 Consider the following information for a mutual fund, the market index, and the risk-free rate. You also know that the return correlation between the fund and the market is 0.89. Year Fund Market Risk-Free 2008 -17.6 % -34.5 % 2 % 2009 25.1 20.5 4 2010 13.4 12.4 2 2011 6.6 8.4 5 2012 -1.8 -4.2 3 Calculate Jensen’s alpha for the fund, as well as its information ratio. (Round your Jensen’s alpha answer to 2 decimal places&  Information ratioanswer to 4 decimal places. Omit the "%" sign in your response.) July 2, 1997 Affirmative Action Ban Changes a Law School By PETER APPLEBOME AUSTIN, Tex.— Born at the old Houston Hospital for Negroes a month before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, Rodney Ellis dreamed big, aimi ...

1. Supreme Court on Voting Rights October 9, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday stopped
officials in Wisconsin from requiring voters there to provide
photo identification before casting their ballots in the coming
election.
Three of the court’s more conservative members dissented,
saying they would have allowed officials to require
identification.
The requirement, one of the strictest in the nation, is part of a
state law enacted in 2011 but mostly blocked by various courts
in the interim. A federal trial judge had blocked it, saying it
would “deter or prevent a substantial number of the 300,000-
plus registered voters who lack ID from voting,”
disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic voters.
The law was provisionally reinstated last month by a unanimous
three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Chicago just
hours after it heard arguments in the case. The full court was
deadlocked, five to five, on a request for a new hearing.
“It is simply impossible, as a matter of common sense and of
logistics, that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters will
both learn about the need for photo identification and obtain the
requisite identification in the next 36 days,” the appeals court
judges opposed to the requirement wrote.
The three-judge panel issued a decision on Monday upholding
the law, reasoning that it was similar to one from Indiana that
the Supreme Court upheld in 2008.
Read the question and please scan or photo your working,

2. accurate answer only.
Problem 13-14
a.
A stock has an annual return of 11.2 percent and a standard
deviation of 45 percent. What is the smallest expected gain over
the next year with a probability of 1 percent? (Round your
answer to 2 decimal places. Omit the "%" sign in your
response.)
Problem 13-19
Consider the following information for a mutual fund, the
market index, and the risk-free rate. You also know that the
return correlation between the fund and the market is 0.95.
Year
Fund
Market
Risk-Free
2008
-15.13
%
-25.5
%
2
%
2009
25.1
19.6

3. 4
2010
12.5
9.7
2
2011
6.4
7.6
4
2012
-1.26
-2.2
3
What are the Sharpe and Treynor ratios for the fund? (Round
your answer to 4 decimal places.)
Problem 13-20
Consider the following information for a mutual fund, the
market index, and the risk-free rate. You also know that the
return correlation between the fund and the market is 0.89.
Year
Fund
Market

4. Risk-Free
2008
-17.6
%
-34.5
%
2
%
2009
25.1
20.5
4
2010
13.4
12.4
2
2011
6.6
8.4
5

5. 2012
-1.8
-4.2
3
Calculate Jensen’s alpha for the fund, as well as its information
ratio. (Round your Jensen’s alpha answer to 2 decimal places&
Information ratioanswer to 4 decimal places. Omit the "%" sign
in your response.)
July 2, 1997
Affirmative Action Ban Changes a Law School
By PETER APPLEBOME
AUSTIN, Tex.— Born at the old Houston Hospital for Negroes
a month before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of
Education ruling in 1954, Rodney Ellis dreamed big, aiming not
just for law school but for law school at Harvard or the
University of Texas.
Mr. Ellis, the son of a yardman and a maid, who is now a
powerful State Senator here, went to law school at the
University of Texas, then the clubby, overwhelmingly white
launching pad for the state's aspiring movers and shakers.
The Texas law school is still as powerful as ever in a state
where minorities now make up 40 percent of the population. But
it is hard for Mr. Ellis to look back on how far he has come
without thinking that his alma mater will enroll fewer new black

6. law students next fall than at any time since Jim Crow began to
recede, and that now he would probably have a better chance of
getting into Harvard than Texas.
It is a problem that resonates nationwide, as evidence continues
to mount that bans on affirmative action are having devastating
effects on enrollment of minorities, particularly blacks, at the
states' most prestigious public universities and professional
schools.
And it is particularly painful at the law school here, which as
much as any place in American academia sums up the
switchbacks, unresolved issues and maddening contradictions of
race and affirmative action.
In the course of 25 years, the school has gone from one that
trained almost no black and Hispanic lawyers to one that since
the 1980's had been producing more than any school in the
country, to one that is now, after a court ruling last year,
becoming overwhelmingly white once again. So far, only 3
black and 20 Hispanic students have put down deposits in an
entering class of 500 for the 1997-98 school year. The entering
class last fall had 31 blacks and 42 Hispanic students.
In 1950, the University of Texas Law School was the subject of
a landmark ruling in favor of desegregation and last year it was
the subject of perhaps the most far-reaching Federal court ruling
against affirmative action in college admissions. And all the
while it has remained a place central to the power structure of
the state, one where bonds are made that lead to judgeships,
partnerships or political candidacies many years later.
''Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed the clock
could be rolled back that far that quick,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''I
remember reading the great civil rights cases in law school,
most of them anti-civil rights, and thinking how you can make a

7. cogent argument for damn near anything, and here we are again,
with intelligent men in black robes using the words of Martin
Luther King to roll the clock back again.''
Critics of affirmative action say that rather than rolling back the
clock, ending affirmative action has shown how pervasive racial
preferences were. But it is clear that Texas and California have
become laboratories for a world without affirmative action and
that the impact thus far has been been stunning.
In California, where the Board of Regents' ban on affirmative
action went into effect first for graduate schools this year,
enrollment of black and Hispanic students in the fall classes has
plunged at top law and medical schools. The University of
California at Berkeley announced this week that if current
figures held up, enrollment of blacks in the law school would
decline to 1 next fall from 20 the year before, while the number
of Hispanic students would drop to 18 from 28.
In Texas, the changes are the result of a ruling last year by the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the
Hopwood v. Texas reverse discrimination suit. A three-judge
panel ruled that, contrary to the Supreme Court's ruling in the
landmark 1978 Bakke case, which allowed the use of race as
one of many factors in admissions, the law school was barred
from using race at all.
Attorney General Dan Morales of Texas has interpreted the
ruling as banning affirmative action in admissions, scholarships
and college recruiting programs, a ruling that is being applied at
virtually all public and private Texas colleges, since even
private ones use various forms of Federal money, for example,
grants and student loans.
As a result, the elite public universities in Texas and California,
the nation's most populous states, are playing by entirely

8. different rules than universities they compete with, nearly all of
which use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions.
The Harvard Law School, which Mr. Ellis declined to apply to
in 1976, figuring he would not be accepted, last fall had 59
black and 31 Hispanic students in an entering class of 500.
The Texas law school's history makes the drop in minority
enrollment particularly striking. In 1950, it was the site of the
Sweatt v. Painter lawsuit filed by Heman Sweatt, a black
applicant, challenging the institution's ''separate but equal''
policy of offering a law degree from the University of Texas
School of Law for Negroes, which had two students and met at a
residence across the street from the State Capitol.
The Supreme Court ruled the program unconstitutional, saying
that it did not and could not offer the contacts and connections
that the white law school did and thus was not ''separate but
equal.''
The Texas law school, which had long had a few Hispanic
students, graduated its first black in 1953. But in some years as
late as 1971 the entering class had no blacks and only a few
Hispanic students. The school began its affirmative action
program in the 1970's and by the 1980's had formalized it into
one that officials now admit went beyond the constraints of
Bakke by sorting applicants into groups by race, with lower
entrance scores required of black and Hispanic students.
Mr. Ellis, who graduated in 1979, said the school's success in
educating blacks and Mexican-Americans was a testament to the
degree to which affirmative action had worked.
''I clearly got in through an affirmative action program, and I
don't apologize for it,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''I'm proud of it. It got me
in, but it didn't get me out, didn't take the bar exam for me,

9. didn't pass the 285 or so pieces of legislation I've authored.''
And he argues that the issue in Sweatt is still relevant today --
that limiting minorities to second-tier schools has the same
impact as keeping Heman Sweatt out of the regular law school.
''If I had known when I was 23 that I'd be a member of the
Houston City Council at 29 and a state senator at 34, I clearly
would have opted for the University of Texas, even if I got into
Harvard,'' he said.
But Lino Graglia, a University of Texas law professor critical of
affirmative action, said the reverberations from Hopwood
simply showed what critics of affirmative action had long
contended: that it had led to the admission of less qualified
applicants.
''The whole reason you have racial preferences is that the
racially preferred do not meet the standards applied to others,''
Professor Graglia said. ''If you require that they meet the
standards, then they don't get in.''
Terry Pell, a lawyer for the Center for Individual Rights, a
conservative legal group that represented the Hopwood
plaintiffs, said it was too early to tell how big an impact
Hopwood would have. Mr. Pell said the law school's
administration had created a self-fulfilling prophecy by scaring
off minorities with a steady chorus of comments on how much
Hopwood had tied their hands.
Many of Texas' most talented minority applicants are torn
between the lure of the Texas law school and the lure of more
diverse schools.
Malcolm Lavergne of Houston was the first black to send in a
tuition deposit to the University of Texas Law School for the

10. fall term. But when Mr. Lavergne learned he was the only one,
he changed his mind in May and told Texas he had decided to
attend Cornell University Law School, which like the University
of Texas Law School ranks among the top 20 in the country and
where officials expect about a quarter of the next class to be
members of minorities.
Mr. Lavergne, an honors graduate of Stephen F. Austin State
University in Nacogdoches, Tex., with a college grade point
average of 3.95, said in a telephone interview that the Texas law
school had been his first choice.
He said, ''I'm a Texas boy, and my heart's in going to Texas, but
while other schools can compete for top minority students,
they're like they're strapped down to a gurney with their hands
tied. It's a shame, and it's not U.T.'s fault, but it would be like
going to a country club there.''
Now that three other blacks have sent in their tuition deposits,
Texas officials are trying to get Mr. Lavergne to reconsider.
The enrollment figures have alarmed even some critics of
affirmative action. The Texas Legislature this year passed a
measure that would allow high school graduates in the top 10
percent of their class to attend the state university of their
choice, in effect using the often-segregated nature of high
schools to integrate universities. The measure, which has
become law, would not affect post-graduate schools.
And many white law school students have expressed alarm at
the admissions figures for this year.
One white applicant, a recent Yale University graduate from
Houston named Justin Nelson, recently wrote Texas saying he
had decided not to enroll there after being accepted because of
the effects of Hopwood.

11. ''I don't consider myself any kind of radical,'' he said in a
telephone interview. ''I'm a very moderate person, but I pride
myself on having an open mind and I felt that going to a school
that's 99 percent white, doesn't represent the society, and the
law should represent society.''
Affirmative action critics here and in California say talk of
''resegregating'' higher education is rhetorical overkill.
''This notion that we're resegregating American higher
education is ludicrous,'' said Ward Connerly, the member of the
California Board of Regents who led the assault on affirmative
action there. ''It's based on competition. And at the end of the
competition we cannot predict that there will be 50 fat kids and
10 skinny kids or so many blacks and so many whites. We can
only guarantee that the competition to get there was fair.''
But older graduates in Texas say what is happening now looks
like history repeating itself.
''Once upon a time, we had a 'separate but equal' doctrine that
we lived with for a long time, and we paid a terrible price for,''
said James DeAnda, whose parents came to Texas from Mexico
about 1915 and who was one of the few Mexican-Americans at
University of Texas Law School when Heman Sweatt was filing
his lawsuit. ''You pay for today's mistakes tomorrow. I think
this is a step backward, and the country is going to be poorer
for it.''
Photo: Rodney Ellis, now a Texas State Senator, says
affirmative action allowed him to attend the acclaimed
University of Texas Law School. (F. Carter Smith for The New
York Times)
· Copyright 2014The New York Times Company

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