The Supreme Court sided with Abigail Fisher, the woman who sued the University of Texas at Austin over affirmative action, in a narrow ruling that stopped short of reversing the school’s policies but left the door open for future challenges to race-based admissions.
Fisher’s case rested on an oft-overlooked provision of Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the legality of affirmative action admissions at public universities. In Grutter, the Supreme Court held that universities could only use race as a factor in admissions if such a policy was necessary to create a diverse student body.
In its 7-1 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with Fisher that Texas did not satisfy this requirement.
“The reviewing court must ultimately be satisfied that no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion for the Court.
The decision vacated and remanded a contrary ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will re-examine Fisher’s case in light of the Supreme Court’s verdict.
Jennifer Gratz, a noted opponent of race-based admissions and plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Gratz v. Bollinger — which struck down the University of Michigan’s broad affirmative action policies — praised the decision.
“It’s a victory for our side, no doubt,” she said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Overall, it’s a good decision.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the lone dissenter in Fisher v. Texas. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself and did not participate in the case.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas filed separate concurring opinions. In Scalia’s extremely brief concurrence, he noted that the plaintiff’s side did not ask the court to overturn Grutter entirely. Thomas made clear in his own opinion that he would have struck down affirmative action entirely if that question had been presented to him.
“I write separately to explain that I would overrule Grutter v. Bollinger… and hold that a State’s use of race in higher education admissions decisions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause,” wrote Thomas.
In light of Scalia and Thomas’s requests from broader challenges to affirmative actions, opponents of race-based admissions policies should be bolder in the future, said Gratz.
“I do wish that our side would have been bold,” she said.
Carrie Severino, chief counsel to the Judicial Crisis Network and a former law clerk for Thomas, wrote that the decision brings America nearer to the end of affirmative action.
“The Court did not decide today whether those preferences are valid, but they seem one step closer to agreeing with the countless parents who simply want their children to be evaluated on the basis of their character and hard work,” she wrote in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Still, the decision is a good reminder that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in Grutter said that affirmative action would only necessary for the next 25 years, said Gratz.
“I think the universities have ignored all of that,” she said. “They expected to use race forever.”
If the justices wish to overturn Grutter and ban affirmative action entirely, they will have a chance to do so in the fall. The Court has agreed to hear Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which asks whether states are allowed to ban race-based admissions.
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