That Harvard Case

From time to time, we have reported on the Harvard admissions case which has been making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and which could potentially outlaw affirmative action in university admissions. We have also noted that there are some distinctions between what occurs at Harvard and what occurs at UC. One is that UC is a public institution while Harvard is private. However, another related case has been making its way to the Supreme Court from the U of North Carolina. The other is that under Prop 209, which voters recently declined to repeal, California in principle already doesn't allow affirmative action. Whether Prop 209 will (perhaps ironically) insulate UC from whatever the Supreme Court might do remains to be seen.

However, it appears that both the Harvard case and the U of North Carolina cases have now arrived at the Supreme Court. From the LA Times:

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a major challenge to race-based affirmative action in the nation’s colleges and universities, setting the stage for another long-sought win for conservatives. The justices voted to hear a pair of appeals contending that Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the oldest public university, are violating civil rights laws by giving preferences to some minority students seeking admission while discriminating against others, including Asian Americans. 

They ask the court to rule that universities, whether public or private, may "not use race as a factor in admissions.” And they rely on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says no person “shall be subjected to discrimination ... on the ground of race, color or national origin” in a school or university that receives federal funds. Since 1978, however, the Supreme Court has held that colleges, universities and law schools may consider a student’s race or ethnicity as a “plus factor” in order to create more diversity in their classes. In recent decades, the court took up anti-affirmative action challenges to the admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Texas, but upheld them narrowly over sharp dissents from the conservatives.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was among the dissenters, and he now has five more conservative justices on his right. And they are in position to overturn the past rulings that upheld affirmative action...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-01-24/supreme-court-agrees-to-decide-college-affirmative-action-case.