by Jeremy Leaming
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority is seemingly preparing to provide a potentially fatal blow to affirmative action policy. After the high court announced earlier today that it would consider Fisher v. Texas, a white college student’s challenge to the University of Texas’ affirmative action policy, The Huffington Post’s Mike Sacks wrote, that affirmative action was heading back to the high court “and this time its prospects for survival are poorer than ever.”
As Sacks notes, in 2003 the Supreme Court upheld by a 5-4 vote in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s affirmative action program was constitutional. The law school’s policy, in part, was based on a longstanding commitment to “one particular type of diversity,” that is, “racial and ethnic diversity with special reference to the inclusion of students from groups which have been historically discriminated against, like, African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, who without this commitment might not be represented in our student body in a meaningful manner.”
via www.acslaw.org
