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Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court held that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions. In 2013, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed suit against Harvard University in U.S. District Court in Boston, alleging that the university's undergraduate admission practices violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Asian Americans. In 2019 a district court judge upheld Harvard's limited use of race as a factor in admissions, stating lack of evidence for 'discriminatory animus' or 'conscious prejudice'. In 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling. In 2021, SFFA petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Following the appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers at the time, the cases were split with Jackson recusing from the Harvard case while participating in the North Carolina one. On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Harvard that, by a vote of 6–2, reversed the lower court ruling. In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional. Because of the absence of U.S. military academies in the cases, the lack of relevant lower court rulings, and the potentially distinct interests that the military academies may present, the Court, limited by Article III, did not decide the fate of race-based affirmative action in the military academies. Background The historical and legal background of the case spans several decades from the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke over the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger to the 2016 case Fisher v. University of Texas (2016). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bakke, a 1978 landmark decision, that affirmative action could be used as a determining factor in college admission policy but that the University of California, Davis School of Medicine's racial quota was discriminatory. The Court upheld this case in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 landmark decision. Concurrently, the Court ruled that the points system used by the University of Michigan to favor underrepresented minorities was unconstitutional in Gratz v. Bollinger. The Court vacated Fisher v. University of Texas (2013) and upheld the lower court's decision to apply strict scrutiny to the University of Texas at Austin's race-conscious admissions policy in Fisher v. University of Texas (2016). In Fisher II, strict scrutiny requires that the use of race serve a "compelling governmental interest"—like the educational benefits that stem from diversity—and be "narrowly tailored" to satisfy that interest. Institutions that receive federal funding, such as Harvard University, are subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws racial discrimination. For years prior to the decision which took place in 2023, affirmative action in the United States was considered by some to be a wedge issue among Asian Americans. It was contended in such circles that the practice drew criticism from white and Asian Americans, but support from African Americans, and mixed support among an ethnic designation, Hispanic and Latino Americans. In polling for affirmative action, answers varied depending on how the question is asked, suggesting ambivalence. Among Democrats and Republicans, there is a divide. Opposition to affirmative action emerged in the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, particularly with editor Nathan Glazer's book Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (1975). In the Roberts Court, Chief Justice John Roberts questioned the benefits of diversity in a physics class in Fisher II. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have opposed affirmative action; the remaining three conservative justices had no track record of opposing affirmative action prior to the ruling, although a 1999 article Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in The Wall Street Journal signaled he would end it. The liberal Sotomayor has repeatedly and proudly said that she is a “product of affirmative action” and has defended affirmative action in previous cases before the Court. District Court case Lawsuit SFFA filed a lawsuit in federal district court against Harvard University on November 17, 2014, representing a group of anonymous Asian American plaintiffs rejected from the university. The suit made the claim Asians were being discriminated against in favor of whites. SFFA was founded by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, who also founded the Project on Fair Representation, with a goal to end racial classifications in education, voting procedures, legislative redistricting, and employment. Blum participated in cases such as Bush v. Vera, Shelby County v. Holder, and Fisher v. University of Texas. The SFFA case was the first high-profile case on behalf of plaintiffs who were not white, and who had academic credentials that, according to Vox, were "much harder to criticize." The lawyers for SFFA stated that the initial hearing focused on the issue of discrimination against Asian American applicants, instead of trying to challenge affirmative action in general. Certain Asian American advocacy groups filed amicus briefs in support of SFFA, believing that they or their children are discriminated against in college admission processes. Other Asian American advocacy groups filed amicus briefs in support of Harvard. On May 15, 2015, a coalition of more than 60 Asian American organizations filed federal complaints with the United States Department of Education and Department of Justice against Harvard University. The coalition asked for a civil rights investigation into what it described as Harvard's discriminatory admission practices against Asian American applicants. The complaints at the Department of Education were dismissed in July 2015 because a lawsuit making similar allegations had already been filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) in November 2014. However, in 2017, the coalition resubmitted their complaints to the Department of Justice under the Trump administration. It opened an investigation into allegations against Harvard's policies, and that investigation was ongoing as of February 2020. Plaintiff allegations In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs claimed that Harvard imposes a soft quota of “racial balancing" that artificially depresses the number of Asian-American applicants admitted .... Discover the Sharon Paskoff popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sharon Paskoff books.