She is white, and applied with a 3.8 gpa and a score of 161 on her LSAT. The University did admit that it takes race into consideration for the use of creating a more diverse school. It was held that the Schools interest in diversity was not in fact compelling enough to the court. After being brought to the court of Appeals, though, a binding precedent did establish this as compelling and they say it should be viewed under strict scrutiny.…
In 1997, the Texas legislature enacted a law requiring all public universities in Texas to admit all high school seniors who ranked in the top ten percent of their high school’s graduating class. The University of Texas at Austin, after finding disparities between the racial and ethnic makeup of the university's undergraduate population and the state's population, decided to modify its race-neutral admissions policy. The new policy continued to admit all in-state students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school classes, however, for the remainder of the in-state freshman class the university would consider race as a factor for admissions into the university. The plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, a white female, applied for undergraduate admission to the University of Texas in 2008.…
Not only does this case deal with the concept of affirmative action and racial quotas, but also the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that no business or state shall deny a person based on their race or sex. Allan Bakke, the defendant in this case, actually applied to the university two…
Second, it is certain that affirmative action has benefited a group of people more than others. Initially, affirmative action was meant for federal contractors. Although, they were supposed to employee people without regards to their race, color, or national origin, studies have shown “that affirmative action helps white woman” (Nittle) more than women or men of color. In the Supreme Court case of Abigail Fisher versus the University of Texas, ironically, she is the type of person affirmative action benefits the most. But the ban of affirmative action has not always been a disadvantage for all minorities.…
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018. Gearey, Davd P. “New Protections after Boy Scouts of America v Dale: A Private University’s First Amendment Right to Pursue Diversity.” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 2004, pp. 1583-604. Google Scholar, chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=5276&context=uclrev.…
The Supreme Court has made various decisions that Liberals welcome with open arms, but one recent decision is not popular with Democrats. The Supreme Court agreed to reopen the case Fisher v. The University of Texas. The case is seem as the court case that will finally repeal 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, and remove demolish the affirmative action program. Fisher v. The University of Texas was a Supreme Court case in 2013 that was sent back to lower courts. The court case deals with Abigail Fisher, a white middle-class female that feels she was passed over for less qualified minority students.…
Blakee later learned that minorities with lower qualifications than Blakee were granted admission to the School because of the quota at the California at Davis School of Medicine. Eventually Justice Powell of the Supreme court ruled that the quota at the California School of Medicine was unconstitutional. The fact that there were differences in the Fisher v. University of Texas and the California V. Blakee case left people into determining if Justice Powell’s decision was…
Yet, the question still stands, considering race never means just minority races or majority races, and it’s the consideration of race which does not mean you won 't get in because of the race you are. I went through the Amicus briefs for this case, The United States, supported the university of Texas because there are educational benefits that come from student body diversity that justifies any university’s consideration of race during admissions. Teach for America, supported University of Texas because they felt desegregation of schools is one of the most important factors to date, and supported a mixed class of races. Even, Harvard University supported University of Texas because courts long affirmed that after a student body is judged if they meet the academic needs , that race is allowed to play a factor in selection, that amicus brief really stood out to me for the reason that harvard is a private university and doesn’t have to abide by the Equal Protection clause but still decided in favor of The University of Texas. I also looked at amicus briefs that supported fisher American Civil Rights Union, supported Fisher for the fact that the college was racially discriminative of whites and Jews and favours of minorities and that spoil systems for race were put in place.…
In 1995, Jennifer Gratz applied to the University of Michigan for undergraduate admission at the School of Literature, Arts and Sciences (LSA) and was denied, not being competitive enough to be selected for a spot in the class that year. Two years later, Barbara Grutter applied to the Law School at the University of Michigan with competitive credentials and was also denied admission to the School of Law. Gratz filed a class action suit against the university and argued that she had been discriminated against because she was part of a majority group being of Caucasian ethnicity; similarly, Barbara Grutter also filed a lawsuit, claiming that the school violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights. Both court cases asked the controversial question of if the school’s admission policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and in Gutter’s Case whether Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was violated. Both cases started out in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and then continued to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals before proceeding to the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court.…
citizens. Although the Executive Order 9808 held equality, it did not prevent the states from promoting segregation and discrimination. For instance, in Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents, Marshall, Sipuel’s civil rights attorney, argued that the denial of Sipuel’s admission because of her race and color was considered to be illegal. In addition, Marshall claimed that the words “separate” and “equal” were not equivalent, and could not be used together at the same time (Ladino, 13). Although the court ruled that the university’s rejection of Sipuel was unconstitutional in terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, the court claimed that desegregation was not the problem that interrupted Sipuel’s admission.…
Fisher argues that although Grutter permits universities to seek a “critical mass” of minority students in the student body, it does not suggest that each classroom must have a similar critical mass. Instead, she claims that the proper base for measuring diversity is the student body as a whole. Fisher further argues that even if UT’s admission policy furthers a compelling state interest, the university has failed to show that the policy is necessary to create a diverse student body. She asserts that Texas’s Top Ten Percent Law has caused a dramatic increase in minority enrollment, so UT has established a “critical mass” of minority students without the use of racial classifications. Because the Top Ten Percent Law has proven to be a “workable race-neutral alternative,” Fisher claims that UT’s race-conscious admissions policy is not necessary to ensure…
The result was a split for Michigan, with the Law School's more individualized consideration of race upheld on a 5 to 4 vote, and the undergraduate school's more blatant heavy weighting of race as a plus factor struck down, 6 to 3. Justice O'Connor's opinion for the Court in Grutter adopted much of Justice Powell's reasoning in Bakke. O'Connor found the Law School's asserted interest in creating a diverse student body to be a compelling justification for its consideration of race, and found the school admission policy appropriately considered race along with many other characteristics or experiences that could contribute to diversity. O'Connor cautioned, however, that affirmative action programs should have some termination point, and she suggested that in another twenty-five years a similarly structured program would be unlikely to…
In the case, there are 4 major political actors that appear in the article with quite different interests. One of these actors includes the University of Texas at Austin in which the President of the university said, “We remain committed to assembling a student body at The University of Texas at Austin that provides the educational benefits of diversity on campus while respecting the rights of all students and acting within the constitutional framework established by the Court” (NBC news article). The political actor that stands on the…
As it is now, it facilitates the entrance to college to minorities of the higher classes. In its current form, affirmative action is well intentioned, but it is rather ineffective, and it sets itself up for causing a stir among whites who feel that minority status is taking precedent over academic performance, and calling this practice reverse discrimination. The case against the University of Michigan is a prime example of this. But William Symonds has a solution that would not only allow for more racial integration, but with race not playing a big role, if any roll at all in being a factor in deciding college admissions. Basing affirmative action off of financial need, with the money provided for the less fortunate to attend four-year universities would not only draw from the pool of minorities that make up a large portion of the lower classes, it would also give everyone a truly equal opportunity to attend college.…
The three-part test associated with Title IX needs to be more developed and rationalized for the law to be properly met. Providing equal participation opportunities for male and female students that also represents the university population, expanding on a broken program, and attempting to show that they have properly accommodated the interest of the underrepresented members in a program is essentially unrealistic and holds more problems than need be. To…