Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/139

8 protection principle and resolved the debate: The Court declared that race-based affirmative action in higher education could continue for another generation, and only for another generation, at least absent something unexpected. Grutter, 539 U. S., at 343. As I have explained, the Court’s pronouncement of a 25-year period—as both an extension of and an outer limit to race-based affirmative action in higher education—formed an important part of the carefully constructed Grutter decision. I would abide by that temporal limit rather than discarding it, as today’s dissents would do.

To be clear, although progress has been made since Bakke and Grutter, racial discrimination still occurs and the effects of past racial discrimination still persist. Federal and state civil rights laws serve to deter and provide remedies for current acts of racial discrimination. And governments and universities still “can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.” Croson, 488 U. S., at 526 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment) (internal quotation marks omitted); see id., at 509 (plurality opinion of O’Connor, J.) (“the city has at its disposal a whole array of race-neutral devices to increase the accessibility of city contracting opportunities to small entrepreneurs of all races”); ; Brief for Petitioner 80–86; Reply Brief in No. 20–1199, pp. 25–26; Reply Brief in No. 21–707, pp. 23–26.

In sum, the Court’s opinion today is consistent with and follows from the Court’s equal protection precedents, and I join the Court’s opinion in full.