The New Yorker:

From 2015: In one case after another, the Roberts Court has dramatically rejected Marshall’s view of education.

By Lincoln Caplan

The Supreme Court has gradually narrowed the acceptable grounds for affirmative action since 1978, when it found, in the Bakke case, that racial quotas could not be used in university admissions. That pattern makes the case known as Fisher II, which was argued today, feel momentous: it gives the conservative majority a second chance to decide that the University of Texas at Austin used race in an unconstitutional way when it chose the freshman class in 2008 and rejected the white applicant Abigail Fisher, and to rule that it’s unconstitutional for public universities and colleges to take race into account in admissions.

Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., wrote the controlling Bakke opinion, in which he held that racial and ethnic classifications were inherently suspect. As his biographer John C. Jeffries, Jr. has explained, Powell wanted to preserve “for the future the ideal of a color-blind society.” But, Jeffries continued, Powell believed that giving preference in admissions to well-qualified members of racial and ethnic minorities was “vital to an integrated society,” and that outlawing the practice would be, in Powell’s words, “a disaster for the country.”

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