The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear two cases, one against Harvard and the other against the University of North Carolina. Filed by the conservative activist group Students for Fair Admissions, the cases challenge the legality of affirmative action, which allows colleges and universities to consider racial disparities — along with other identity-based factors — as part of admissions.
The benefits of affirmative action are embedded both in established legal precedence and social science research. Notably, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Although racial quotas were invalidated by the Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger, there are now ongoing efforts to block affirmative action entirely.
In 2012, the Supreme Court heard the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and ruled that strict scrutiny had to be applied to admission programs that consider race and that the lower courts had not applied these measures.
