Supreme Court Wades Into Affirmative Action Issue

The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday it will revisit the issue of affirmative action in higher education. The Court agreed to hear arguments this fall in a case challenging the affirmative action program at the University of Texas. Returning to enter the fray after more than thirty years of settled law on the subject, most newly energized conservative court has signaled that might be willing to destabilize much of that law.

Nine years ago, the high court, by a vote of 5 to 4, affirmed the decision 1978 stating that the race can be one of the many factors that can be considered in college admissions.

The author of this opinion, 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, said the quotas, while they are not allowed, "racial diversity is an essential part of the mission of higher education", and therefore the race can be a positive factor, as the son of a student may be one factor, or have athletic talent or musical.

But just two years after writing that historical opinion, O'Connor retired and was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, who has been fairly consistent hostile to the idea of ​​racial preferences in any form.

So when the Supreme Court decided on Tuesday to discuss the issue, the suggestion was that a clear majority of the court more conservative again and might be willing to invest or severely reduced by more than three decades of precedent regarding affirmative action in college and university admissions.

Alito addition, three other judges have been openly antagonistic to the idea of ​​affirmative action, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John Roberts. In a 2007 opinion, Roberts wrote that the racial balance in schools "can not be transformed into a constitutional practice calling it diversity" and diversity is precisely the goal of the Texas program at all levels, to the salon classes.

The fifth potential vote against Texas would be Justice Anthony Kennedy, which has generally taken a less hostile tone. However, Kennedy has never voted for a voluntary affirmative action.

To complicate matters even bleaker for supporters of affirmative action is the fact that only eight judges hear the case. Justice Elena Kagan has apologized for before his nomination to the Court, when he served as attorney general of the Obama administration, his office was involved in the case during the proceedings of lower courts.

The claim of Texas action program is a hybrid. Most students slots are allocated by formula. Students in 10 percent of students graduating from high school earning automatic. About 81 percent of school slots were allocated in this way almost four years, when the lawsuit was filed on behalf of a student named Abigail Fisher disappointed.

Fisher was not in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class, and she said she was disadvantaged by the system used to elect the remaining 19 percent of the students. That's where race is considered, along with grades, a personal essay, nature, special talents and special circumstances such as socioeconomic status of the student's family.

Fisher argued that because it had a higher average scores than some minority students who were accepted, she was the victim of unlawful discrimination. Two courts, however, disagreed, and upheld affirmative action program of the university.