Why America’s Supreme Court has ended affirmative action
FORTY-FIVE YEARS after allowing America’s universities to give limited consideration to race in admissions, the Supreme Court changed course on June 29th. Race-based affirmative action programmes in higher education, a 6-3 majority concluded, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The result in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard (consolidated with Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina) was no surprise. Affirmative action has been hanging by a thread for decades, with race-conscious admissions surviving by one-vote margins in Regents of University of California v Bakke in 1978, Grutter v Bollinger in 2003 and Fisher v University of Texas in 2016. When a six-justice conservative majority that was deeply sceptical of using racial criteria took shape in 2020, the demise of affirmative action seemed all but inevitable.
But the 237 pages of opinions—in which every justice but Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan penned their own writings—show that deep divisions persist over how to reckon with America’s legacy of racial discrimination, and what kinds of ameliorative measures the law should allow.
2023-06-29 13:24:38
Original from www.economist.com
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