In response to suits filed by Students For Fair Admissions against Harvard University (on the basis of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) and the University of North Carolina (on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment), the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions programs violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that no State shall “deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws.”
Speaking in favor of the amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War, representatives stated that it represented a “foundation[al] principle"—"the absolute equality of all citizens of the United States politically and civilly before their own laws,” that any “law which operates upon one man [should] operate equally upon all.” President-to-be Garfield observed that the amendment would hold “over every American citizen, without regard to color, the protecting shield of law.”
After the terrible injustice of its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed government segregation under the claim of “separate but equal” accommodations, the Supreme Court got it right in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education, where it affirmed its determination that “racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.”
Regarding the cases now before it, the opinion, authored by Chief Justice Roberts states, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
Justice Thomas concludes, in his concurring opinion, that the Court “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional.”
