Add affirmative action to the growing laundry list of major cases that are on the Supreme Court’s agenda. In addition to abortion rights, Covid mandates, gun rights, and religious freedoms, the high court will also hear twin cases on affirmative action.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear the pair of challenges against considering applicants’ race in college admissions.
Lawsuits claim that private top university Harvard University, and the popular state school University of North Carolina, discriminate against applicants who are Asian American.
It gives the conservative-majority court an opportunity to overturn protections that for decades have helped increase opportunity for groups that have been discriminated against, therefore have historically been blocked from the opportunity for centuries.
The cases have both been brought forward by a conservative non-profit run by Edward Blum called Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Blum has personally spent the past decade attempting to end affirmative action through different lawsuits.
Prominent civil rights law organization the Legal Defense Fund said that any ruling that calls into question the legality of race-conscious admissions would reverse more than four decades of decisions made by the Supreme Court, which have continuously and consistently confirmed that race-conscious admissions in higher education are constitutional and legal.
The last affirmative action case heard in the Supreme Court was in 2016, and was also brought forth by Blum. In the case, Fisher v the University of Texas, Blum argued that the school’s policies on admissions discriminated against a white female applicant, Abigail Fisher. The court upheld affirmative action.
But since then, the makeup of the Supreme Court judges has changed drastically. Former President Donald Trump’s three judge appointments are extremely conservative and have tipped the balance of the court significantly. It will be the first time that this new court makeup has had to review affirmative action.
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