The Supreme Court Overturns Fifty Years of Precedent on Affirmative Action

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Another crucial question is whether schools may continue to pursue their interest in racial diversity through means other than affirmative action--that is, through race-neutral methods.
56% : On Thursday, the Court used the same test, referred to today as "strict scrutiny," to declare that affirmative action is impermissible.
50% : And Justice Brett Kavanaugh zeroed in on the idea that affirmative action was always seen as temporary, listing all the times that Justices have said so, including in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's famous line, in the landmark affirmative-action case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003): "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
45% : According to the majority opinion, the use of affirmative action by colleges and universities to admit a diverse student body violates the guarantee of equal protection of the laws and the prohibition on discrimination based on race.
42% : The dissents in the S.F.F.A. cases underscored not only that the sins that the United States has visited on Black people did not end after slavery and Jim Crow but also that the original justification for affirmative action which the Court approved five decades ago -- diversity -- was entirely incommensurate to the profound problem to be addressed and was doomed to fail.
26% : On the narrow-tailoring test, Roberts wrote that affirmative action fails because of what he asserted to be a lack of "a meaningful connection" between the use of applicants' race and the interest in diversity.
22% : In the S.F.F.A. cases, Roberts said that affirmative action fails both parts of the test.

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