Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/25

Rh 272–275. The plaintiff, Allan Bakke, was denied admission two years in a row, despite the admission of minority applicants with lower grade point averages and MCAT scores. Id., at 276–277. Bakke subsequently sued the school, arguing that its set-aside program violated the Equal Protection Clause.

In a deeply splintered decision that produced six different opinions—none of which commanded a majority of the Court—we ultimately ruled in part in favor of the school and in part in favor of Bakke. Justice Powell announced the Court’s judgment, and his opinion—though written for himself alone—would eventually come to “serv[e] as the touchstone for constitutional analysis of race-conscious admissions policies.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 323.

Justice Powell began by finding three of the school’s four justifications for its policy not sufficiently compelling. The school’s first justification of “reducing the historic deficit of traditionally disfavored minorities in medical schools,” he wrote, was akin to “[p]referring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin.” Bakke, 438 U. S., at 306–307 (internal quotation marks omitted). Yet that was “discrimination for its own sake,” which “the Constitution forbids.” Id., at 307 (citing, inter alia, Loving, 388 U. S., at 11). Justice Powell next observed that the goal of “remedying … the effects of ‘societal discrimination’ ” was also insufficient because it was “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307. Finally, Justice Powell found there was “virtually no evidence in the record indicating that [the school’s] special admissions program” would, as the school had argued, increase the number of doctors working in underserved areas. Id., at 310.

Justice Powell then turned to the school’s last interest asserted to be compelling—obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a racially diverse student body. That interest, in his view, was “a constitutionally permissible goal for