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Grutter v. Michigan

Along with a similar lawsuit over the university’s undergraduate program, this legal battle presents the Supreme Court with its most important civil rights case in 25 years, challenging the use of racial preferences in school admissions.
/ Source: NBC News correspondent

In a for the university’s law school, the Supreme court said race can be one of many factors that colleges consider when selecting their students, while, at the same time, knocking down a similar lawsuit over the university’s undergraduate program. This legal battle presented the United States Supreme Court with its most important civil rights case in 25 years, challenging the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By ruling the program is not an illegal quota system, the court allowed the University of Michigan law school to use it’s program to ensure a “critical mass” of minorities on it’s campus.

Case: Barbara Grutter v. Lee Bollinger and the University of Michigan

Supreme Court #:

Argument Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2003

Decision Date: Monday, June 23, 2003

Issue: Does the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy in its law school violate the Constitution by impermissibly considering a minority student’s race as a favorable factor?

Background: Because of a difference in the facts and the associated legal arguments, the two cases are being treated separately before the court

Barbara Grutter, a white Michigan resident, applied for admission to the 1997 first-year class of the University of Michigan law school. At the time she applied, she was 43, having graduated from college 18 years earlier. She applied with a 3.8 GPA and a score on the Law School Aptitude Test of 161, ranking in the 86th percentile of students nationally. But the law school turned her down.

In response, she filed a class-action lawsuit against the university in 1997, claiming that she was a victim of reverse discrimination. The trial judge ruled in her favor, finding that the law school’s reasons for using race as a factor in admissions, to achieve diversity among the law students, was not a sufficient one to overcome the legal impediments to discriminating on the basis of race. The university appealed, and a federal appeals court reversed and ruled in favor of the university. Achieving diversity was a sufficient reason, the court said.

The University of Michigan uses race as a factor in choosing students for admission to the law school, with certain preferences given applicants from minority groups considered to be under-represented — African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. The school believes that maintaining a racially diverse student body provides a better education.

Barbara Grutter claims that the school, in effect, reserves a portion of each year’s class for minority students, ranging from 11 percent to 17 percent of

each incoming first-year class. The law school says that it strives to admit “a critical mass” of minority students, so that a sufficient number of minority students are present in each class to achieve the desired diversity of interaction and to avoid making minority students feel that they are mere tokens.

The University argues that its admissions program is explicitly designed to conform to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in a case involving a white student named Allan Bakke, who was denied admission to medical school. He claimed that the University of California’s practice of reserving some slots for minority student amounted to reverse discrimination. Bakke won and the school was ordered to admit him, but the court’s decision produced no clear holding. Lower courts have generally interpreted it to mean that while schools cannot use strict racial quotas, they may take a student’s race into consideration in order to achieve a diverse student body.

Accordingly, the university claims, the racial background of a minority student can be considered as one of many factors in the admissions process. But it says race is not the predominant factor in that policy and that there are no formulas or set criteria for admission. Without such an approach, the law school says, “there is literally no chance” that diversity could be achieved. “Any race-blind methodology applied to the upper and middle grade test score ranges will invariably select a class with very few minority students. In 2000, the university says, only 26 African-Americans applicants nationwide had a GPA of at least 3.5 and an LSAT score of 165, compared to 3,173 whites and Asian Americans.

Argument:

For Barbara Grutter

Kirk Kolbo, Minneapolis; Michael Rosman, Center for Individual Rights, Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court has recognized one interest — remedying past discrimination — as sufficiently compelling to support government programs that grant a racial preference. But the law school’s asserted interest in diversity is incapable of being measured with reference to past injury, or to anything other than the ill-defined nature of the diversity interest itself. It is an interest with as many potential definitions as there are races and ethnicities or educational institutions to promote it.

What’s more, the preferences practiced by the law school rest on crude stereotypes. The admissions process assumes that students are likely to have experiences or perspectives merely because of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group.

Although Justice Powell concluded in Bakke that an interest in diversity, as he defined it, was a compelling one that universities could pursue in considering race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions, no other justice concurred in his rationale. The Court’s subsequent cases have articulated standards on how to decide when a government need is compelling. These standards logically and rightly exclude a nebulous interest in diversity, tied so closely to stereotypes and a remedy for societal discrimination, from qualifying as a compelling justification for racial preferences in university admissions.

An interest is not a compelling justification for racial preferences merely because it is asserted to accomplish some good or achieve some benefit. The interest in diversity is simply too indefinite, ill-defined, and lacking in objective, ascertainable standards to be fitted to narrowly-tailored measures.

Even if the diversity interest could meet constitutional standards, the law school’s admission policies could not possibly be considered narrowly tailored, a second constitutional requirement for government racial preferences. The law school preferences, with their focus on enrolling “meaningful numbers,” a “critical mass,” of the specified minority students, are the functional equivalent of a quota. This is certainly so even if there is not a fixed number that the school seeks to enroll.

For the University of Michigan

Maureen Mahoney, Latham & Watkins, Washington, D.C.

The essential holding of the Supreme Court in the Bakke case was that quotas are illegal but that some attention may be paid to race in a competitive review of the ways that each student will contribute to the overall diversity of the student body. The practices of the law school are virtually indistinguishable from the policy of Harvard, which was specifically endorsed by five of the justices in Bakke. The Barbara Grutter to prevail, the Supreme Court would have to overrule its decision in Bakke.

But no persuasive justification exists for making such a radical break with a settled legal precedent. With the express authorization of the U.S. Department of Education, universities have relied on Bakke for decades. It has become an important part of our national culture. Despite noble aspirations and considerable progress, our society remains deeply troubled by issues of race. Against that backdrop, there are important educational benefits, for students and the wider society, associated with a diverse and racially integrated student body.

The law school’s admissions policy is limited and narrowly tailored to achieve that goal. The heart of that policy is an individualized review of the many different ways in which an applicant might contribute to the learning environment. The law school hopes that its policy will enroll a “critical mass” of minority students, fostering more genuine interaction among students of different racial backgrounds. The law school does not employ quotas, and race is by no means the predominant factor in admissions.

There are no viable race-neutral alternatives. Given the national population of college graduates, law schools like Michigan cannot admit those students in meaningful numbers without paying some attention to race. No honestly colorblind alternative could produce educationally meaningful racial diversity without substantially abandoning reliance on traditional academic criteria.

It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to say that a decision overruling Bakke would force most of the nation’s finest institutions to choose between dramatic resegregation and completely abandoning the demanding standards that have made American higher education the envy of the world.

Friend of court briefs

The two University of Michigan cases have attracted over 100 amicus briefs, a record number. Among the notable ones:

For Barbara Grutter

U.S. Justice Department

Because race-neutral alternatives are available that would achieve diversity, the University of Michigan cannot justify the express considering of race in its admission policy. “The core commitment of the equal protection clause [of the 14th Amendment] and this court’s precedents make clear that the government may not resort to race-based policies unless necessary.” The government says that the law school’s policy of achieving a “critical mass” amounts to a quota. “Any variations in results from year to year owes more to respondents’ inability to predict acceptance rates and total admissions with unfailing accuracy than to any inherent flexibility in the quotas.”

Furthermore, the Justice Department says, “Unlike remedial programs, which by their nature seek to remedy past wrongs and move beyond race-based preferences, respondents’ pursuit of a critical mass of selected minority students would justify such a policy in perpetuity.”

For University of Michigan

Dozens of Fortune 500 companies

“The students of today are this country’s corporate and community leaders of the next half-century. For these students to realize their potential as leaders, it is essential that they be educated in an environment where they are exposed to diverse people, ideas, perspectives, and interactions. Today’s global marketplace and the increasing diversity in the American population demand the cross-cultural experience and understanding gained from such an education,” they argue.

Former military officers and civilian leaders of the Defense Department “A highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps educated and trained to command our nation’s racially diverse enlisted ranks is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principal mission to provide national security. The primary sources for the nation’s officer corps are the service academies and the ROTC, the latter comprised of students already admitted to participating colleges and universities. At present, the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC use limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies,” they say.

Pete Williams is the Supreme Court correspondent for NBC News.