It has been a busy month for Richard Sander, the polarizing University of California at Los Angeles School of Law professor whose controversial “mismatch theory” claims that affirmative action policies actually hurt some minority students by thrusting them into academic situations where they are more likely to struggle.

He’s spent years fighting the State Bar of California to obtain ethnicity and bar pass data that would allow him to look at how individual law students performed on the licensing exam. Earlier this month, the California Supreme Court  declined to take up his appeal. (A trial court judge ruled against Sander in 2016, as did an appellate court earlier this year.)