From SCOTUSBlog:

The six-year running battle over the admissions policy of a highly regarded trio of private schools in Hawaii — the Kamehameha Schools — is back in the courts, with one side specifically aiming for an ultimate test in the Supreme Court.   An earlier case, testing whether an 1866 civil rights law still bars the use of race in private school admissions, reached the Court last year, but was settled before the Justices took final action on it.

A new lawsuit, raising the same challenge, was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Hawaii — with the same name (Doe v. Kamemameha Schools), but with new individuals suing (docket 08-359).  Also on Wednesday, the Schools filed a separate lawsuit in state court in Hawaii, claiming a violation of the 2007 settlement agreement because one of the attorneys involved had disclosed the confidential terms of the deal, including, the attorney said, a payment of $7 million to the youth who had sued.  The Schools’ trustees are seeking return of the money, and other money damages.  (The Feb. 8, 2008, Honolulu Advertiser news story revealing the settlement terms can be read here.)

The new Doe lawsuit in federal court notes that the earlier challenge to the admissions policy, preferring students of “Hawaiian ancestry,” had failed in both the District Court and in the en banc Ninth Circuit Court. The two lawsuits, it says, are “virtually identical,” but it indicates that the four youths and their parents who sued “intend by this action to have that [Ninth Circuit] ruling overturned in the Supreme Court of the United States.”

The first lawsuit against the Schools’ admission policy was filed by a youth identified only as “John Doe”, who sued in June 2003 after being denied admission four times. He is a lifelong resident of Hawaii, but is not “Native Hawaiian” in a racial sense, his challenge noted.  As a minor, he was joined in the lawsuit by his mother, identified only as “Jane Doe.”  The Kamehameha Schools are three kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade private schools on three of Hawaii’s islands.

A press release describing the new civil rights claim can be found here (it includes a link to the text of the complaint).  A press release by Kamehameha Schools announcing its state court lawsuit over the settlement disclosure is here.   The text of the school trustees’ complaint can be found here.