The Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard are unconstitutional. In a pair of decisions, the Court found that the schools’ race-based admission policies violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.
The vote was 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case because Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself because she graduated from Harvard Law School and previously sat on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Her daughter also attends the university.
The decision was penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote that the programs at both schools “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints.”
The ruling effectively overturned the 2003 ruling Grutter v….
