STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. vs PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
Decided June 29, 2023
Chief Justice John Roberts
Justice Clarence Thomas.
Justice Samuel Alito.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Elena Kagan
Justice Neil Gorsuch
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Majority view: Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Barrett, Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Thomas and Justice Kavanaugh
Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are two of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States. Every
year, tens of thousands of students apply to each school; many fewer are admitted. Both Harvard and UNC employ a highly selective admissions process to make their decisions. Admission to each school can depend on a student’s grades, recommendation letters, or extracurricular involvement. It can also depend on their race. The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
….When the 40-member full admissions committee begins its deliberations, it discusses the relative breakdown of applicants by race. The goal of the process, according to Harvard’s director of admissions, is ensuring there is no “dramatic drop-off” in minority admissions from the prior class….
UNC has a similar admissions process. Every application is re[1]viewed first by an admissions office reader, who assigns a numerical rating to each of several categories. Readers are required to consider the applicant’s race as a factor in their review. Readers then make a written recommendation on each assigned application, and they may provide an applicant a substantial “plus” depending on the applicant’s race. At this stage, most recommendations are provisionally final. A committee of experienced staff members then conducts a “school group review” of every initial decision made by a reader and either approves or rejects the recommendation. In making those decisions, the committee may consider the applicant’s race.
Petitioner, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), is a nonprofit or[1]ganization whose stated purpose is “to defend human and civil rights secured by law, including the right of individuals to equal protection under the law.” SFFA filed separate lawsuits against Harvard and UNC, arguing that their race-based admissions programs violate, re[1]spectively, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pro[1]tection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After separate bench trials, both admissions programs were found permissible under the Equal Protection Clause and this Court’s precedents. In the Harvard case, the First Circuit affirmed, and this Court granted certiorari. In the UNC case, this Court granted certiorari before judgment.
Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
a) Because SFFA complies with the standing requirements for or[1]ganizational plaintiffs articulated by this Court in Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Comm’n, 432 U. S. 333, SFFA’s obligations un[1]der Article III are satisfied, and this Court has jurisdiction to consider the merits of SFFA’s claims. The Court rejects UNC’s argument that SFFA lacks standing be[1]cause it is not a “genuine” membership organization. An organiza[1]tional plaintiff can satisfy Article III jurisdiction in two ways, one of which is to assert “standing solely as the representative of its members,” Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 511, an approach known as rep[1]resentational or organizational standing. To invoke it, an organization must satisfy the three-part test in Hunt. Respondents do not suggest that SFFA fails Hunt’s test for organizational standing. They argue instead that SFFA cannot invoke organizational standing at all be[1]cause SFFA was not a genuine membership organization at the time it filed suit. Respondents maintain that, under Hunt, a group qualifies as a genuine membership organization only if it is controlled and funded by its members. In Hunt, this Court determined that a state agency with no traditional members could still qualify as a genuine membership organization in substance because the agency repre[1]sented the interests of individuals and otherwise satisfied Hunt’s three-part test for organizational standing. See 432 U. S., at 342. Hunt’s “indicia of membership” analysis, however, has no applicability here. As the courts below found, SFFA is indisputably a voluntary membership organization with identifiable members who support its mission and whom SFFA represents in good faith. SFFA is thus enti[1]tled to rely on the organizational standing doctrine as articulated in Hunt.
(b) Proposed by Congress and ratified by the States in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” Proponents of the Equal Protection Clause described its “foundation[al] principle” as “not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.” Any “law which operates upon one man,” they maintained, should “operate equally upon all.” Accordingly, as this Court’s early decisions inter[1]preting the Equal Protection Clause explained, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”
Despite the early recognition of the broad sweep of the Equal Pro[1]tection Clause, the Court—alongside the country—quickly failed to live up to the Clause’s core commitments. For almost a century after the Civil War, state-mandated segregation was in many parts of the Nation a regrettable norm. This Court played its own role in that ig[1]noble history, allowing in Plessy v. Ferguson the separate but equal regime that would come to deface much of America. 163 U. S. 537.
After Plessy, “American courts . . . labored with the doctrine [of sep[1]arate but equal] for over half a century.” Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 491. Some cases in this period attempted to curtail the perniciousness of the doctrine by emphasizing that it required States to provide black students educational opportunities equal to—even if formally separate from—those enjoyed by white students. See, e.g., Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U. S. 337, 349–350. But the inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from ine[1]quality—soon became apparent. As the Court subsequently recog[1]nized, even racial distinctions that were argued to have no palpable effect worked to subordinate the afflicted students. See, e.g., McLau[1]rin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Ed., 339 U. S. 637, 640–642. By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.
The culmination of this approach came finally in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483. There, the Court overturned the separate but equal regime established in Plessy and began on the path of inval[1]idating all de jure racial discrimination by the States and Federal Gov[1]ernment. The conclusion reached by the Brown Court was unmistak[1]ably clear: the right to a public education “must be made available to all on equal terms.” 347 U. S., at 493. The Court reiterated that rule just one year later, holding that “full compliance” with Brown required schools to admit students “on a racially nondiscriminatory basis.” Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 300–301.
In the years that followed, Brown’s “fundamental principle that ra[1]cial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional,” id., at 298, reached other areas of life—for example, state and local laws requiring segregation in busing, Gayle v. Browder, 352 U. S. 903 (per curiam); racial segregation in the enjoyment of public beaches and bathhouses Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. Dawson, 350 U. S. 877 (per cu[1]riam); and antimiscegenation laws, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1. These decisions, and others like them, reflect the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause: “do[ing] away with all governmentally im[1]posed discrimination based on race.” Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U. S. 429, 432.
Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. Ac[1]cordingly, the Court has held that the Equal Protection Clause applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality”— it is “universal in [its] application.” Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 369. For “[t]he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.” Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U. S. 265, 289–290.
Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 227, which asks first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 326, and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest, Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 570 U. S. 297, 311–312. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason: “[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”.
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