A year after the US supreme court ended race-conscious admissions in higher education throughout the country, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming that the University of Texas at Austin continued to unlawfully use affirmative action policies. The lawsuit, initially filed in 2020 by Edward Blum’s legal advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), signals a setback to the conservative activist’s movement.
On Monday, the US district judge Robert Pitman ruled that UT Austin’s revised admission policies are lawful under the US constitution’s 14th amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2020, SFFA – the same group that successfully challenged race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina – claimed that at least two of its members had been “denied the opportunity to compete for admission to UT-Austin on equal footing with other applicants on the basis of race or ethnicity because of UT-Austin’s discriminatory admissions policies”, according to the lawsuit.
