If you believe in the value of affirmative action in high
academics — “that student body diversity is a compelling state interest
that can justify the
use of race in university admissions,” to use United States Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s phrase from the last big case on the topic
— then you should know from the get-go that little good
is likely to come from the court’s choice Tuesday to add a new
school admissions case to its docket for consideration next fall, right
around the
presidential election.
Instead, the best you can reasonably hope for in Fisher v. University of Texas
is that the
court will produce a narrow, fact-driven decision that does no
more than strike down UT’s admissions policy because it goes beyond
where Justice
O’Connor said such academic policies could go when she wrote the
majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. That’s the
2003
affirmative action case out of the University of Michigan Law
School, decided by a 5-4 vote, which stands as the controlling legal
precedent here.
Here’s how Scotusblog‘s Lyle Denniston explains how such a result might be justified.
