Supreme Court Rejects
Texas Race Admissions Appeal Supreme Court Rejects
Texas Race Admissions Appeal
Monday June 25 10:35 AM ET
By James Vicini
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court rejected on Monday an appeal by the state arguing the University of Texas law school should be allowed to consider race in admission decisions as a remedy for past discrimination or to achieve ethnic diversity. The Supreme Court, for the second time in two months, passed up an opportunity to consider not only an important issue affecting higher education, but also a key question in the national debate over affirmative action.
The high court rejected the Texas appeal without any comment or dissent. The justices last month declined to hear a challenge by three white students to the admissions policy at the University of Washington law school. The last Supreme Court ruling on the issue was its landmark 1978 ``Bakke v. Board of Regents'' decision, which struck down racial quotas in school admissions but allowed race to be considered in deciding which students to accept.
Blacks and other minority groups have strongly defended affirmative action as a way to make up for past discrimination and foster diversity while critics have attacked them as an unconstitutional form of ``reverse discrimination.'' The Texas case involved four white students, who sued the University of Texas for allegedly being rejected by the law school because of their race in 1992. A U.S. appeals court in 1996 ruled for the students, a decision the Supreme Court declined to review. The long-running litigation continued, and a federal appeals court last year repeated its earlier ``judicial instruction'' to end any consideration of race in law school admissions.
Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, representing the state, appealed to the Supreme Court, saying the case presented fundamental questions about the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education. He urged the justices to address constitutional issues of ''great national importance,'' to resolve conflicting federal appellate court rulings, and to clear up the uncertainty over ''remedial, race-conscious state action.'' Cornyn said the future of the Bakke precedent has ``obvious importance'' to public and private universities and colleges nationwide. After the 1996 appeals court ruling, the number of minorities entering Texas public universities dropped sharply.
State legislators then approved a law that offset the decline by guaranteeing the top 10 percent of students a place in a public university. Attorneys for two of the students said the appeal simply ''repackaged versions of questions'' initially presented in 1996, and that it would be less appropriate for the high court to review the case now than it was five years ago when it denied the state's appeal.
But attorneys for the two other students agreed with the state and urged the court to decide whether it was constitutional to use race or national origin as a factor in admissions.
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