“It seems that almost every year since the middle 1970s,” wrote Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, “we have awaited with hope or anxiety the determination of some major case by the Supreme Court, which would tell us that affirmative action transgressed the ‘equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment . . . or, on the contrary, determine that this was a legitimate approach to overcoming the heritage of discrimination and segregation and raising the position of American blacks.”
Mr. Glazer wrote that in 1987 and couldn’t possibly have imagined it would hold true some 26 years later. Yet on Wednesday the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in this year’s major affirmative-action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. It will be the high court’s second go-round with the case, which concerns a plaintiff named Abigail Fisher who says the university discriminated against her as a white woman in rejecting her application.
In 2013 the justices voted 7-1 to send the case back to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals without ruling directly on the constitutionality of Texas’ affirmative-action program. Instead, the appeals court was instructed to re-evaluate whether a race-based admissions policy was really essential to the university meeting its diversity goals. The Fifth Circuit issued a second ruling last year, once again siding with the university, and now the case is back before the Supreme Court.
