Friday, September 28, 2012

Supreme Court to weigh affirmative action case in busy new term

The Supreme Court marks the beginning of its new term on Monday. Although last year’s judicial fireworks, featuring challenges to the Affordable Care Act and Arizona’s immigration law, aren’t likely to be repeated, the Court will hear several high-profile cases in the month of October.
Affirmative action
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a challenge to Texas’s use of affirmative action in college admissions, is widely hailed as the most important case the Court has agreed to hear thus far.
The case could potentially sound the death knell for affirmative action in the United States.
Texas requires that every student graduating in the top 10 percent of his class be admitted to University of Texas. However, when Abigail Fisher did not graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, she was thrown into the remaining pool of UT applicants where racial preferences are utilized in the selection of students.
Upon being denied admission to UT, Fisher brought suit in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of the affirmative action policy she believed barred her admittance to the school.
The Court last examined racial preferences in 2003, narrowly upholding them in the case Grutter v. Bollinger. However, Sandra Day O’Connor, Grutter’s swing vote, was replaced in 2006 by Samuel Alito, widely believed to be a skeptic of affirmative action.

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