MSNBC legal analyst Catherine Christian claimed Thursday morning that the Supreme Court’s decision to block racial prejudice in college admissions would cut black representation in law schools to three people per class.
Christian, a graduate of Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law, claimed that her graduating class had three African Americans out of 200 in total, and that she believed the decision handed down Thursday would cut black acceptance rates significantly. (Related: ‘A Great Day For America’: 2024 GOP Presidential Candidates Praise SCOTUS For Affirmative Action Decision)
MSNBC claims now that affirmative action has been ruled unconstitutional, there will only be 3 black students per law school class. pic.twitter.com/sM2hxDWdPi
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 29, 2023
The opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice Roberts with Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Barrett concurring, struck down the use of race as a quantifiable factor within admissions. Roberts wrote in summary of his opinion that “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” adding that “our constitutional history does not tolerate” choices made based on “the color of [an individual’s] skin.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, attacked the court’s decision as an “unjustified exercise of power” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in her closing sentence, stating that “‘the arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice.”