Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/43

Rh both opinions are thorough and thoughtful in many respects, this Court has long rejected their core thesis.

The dissents’ interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause is not new. In Bakke, four Justices would have permitted race-based admissions programs to remedy the effects of societal discrimination. 438 U. S., at 362 (joint opinion of Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun, JJ., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). But that minority view was just that—a minority view. Justice Powell, who provided the fifth vote and controlling opinion in Bakke, firmly rejected the notion that societal discrimination constituted a compelling interest. Such an interest presents “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past,” he explained. Id., at 307. It cannot “justify a [racial] classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons … who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the [race-based] admissions program are thought to have suffered.” Id., at 310.

The Court soon adopted Justice Powell’s analysis as its own. In the years after Bakke, the Court repeatedly held that ameliorating societal discrimination does not constitute a compelling interest that justifies race-based state action. “[A]n effort to alleviate the effects of societal discrimination is not a compelling interest,” we said plainly in Hunt, a 1996 case about the Voting Rights Act. 517 U. S., at 909–910. We reached the same conclusion in Croson, a case that concerned a preferential government contracting program. Permitting “past societal discrimination” to “serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief’ for every disadvantaged group.” 488 U. S., at 505. Opening that door would shutter another—“[t]he dream of a Nation of equal citizens … would be lost,” we observed, “in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.” Id., at 505–506. “[S]uch a result would be contrary to both the letter and spirit of a