BAD DAY FOR QUOTAS

The Supreme Court refused to hear two heatedaffirmative-action cases, leaving intact a pair of reverse-discrimination decisions that favored whites. In the first case, white Birmingham, Ala., firefighters successfully objected to 14 city promotions of blacks, complaining that they had been "passed over" despite scoring higher on the promotion exams. A U.S. appeals court had struck down Birmingham's quota plan as unconstitutional. In the second case, the justices let a white man collect $425,000 from a Pittsburgh company he accused of denying him a promotion because of his race. Though many Court-watchers are looking for signs of thecurrent Court's stance on affirmative action, TIME law correspondent Adam Cohen warns that such case refusals "have no precedential value at all." Instead, he says, watch for a major decision by July on a white-owned Colorado company's challenge to federal minority set-asides.