Texas High School Case Summary

Two more cases that aroused much debate on the issue were the 2003 cases of Gratz vs. Bollinger and Grutter vs. Bollinger, in which two more-than-qualified students applied to the University of Michigan and were denied due to acceptance policies. The two women, Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter, took their cases to the Supreme Court with the plea that the University of Michigan is “treating people differently based on skin color, and that is unconstitutional” (Mears). The university openly stated that they have a point system in their acceptance process in which students receive extra point if they are of minority status. Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan stated, “[W]e

Affirmative Action. For many Texas high school students, these two words haunt them. Their future, or at least their future at the University of Texas, depends on these words. For Abigail Noel Fisher, a 2008 graduate from Sugar Land, Texas, affirmative action and its race bias policies allegedly ruined her chances of getting into this prestigious state university. Fisher argues that race should not be a factor in college admissions processes, Fisher argues for equality. Equality in respect to race is in our constitution; it surrounds us everyday. In theory, race should be irrelevant in this day and age. Humanity has established that one race is not superior to another, so why should race matter at all in the college admissions process? Why should the University of Texas, or any other university, have that “check your race” box on their applications? Abigail Fisher, and every other person applying to the university, deserves as much opportunity as every other student of any race. When it comes to college, intelligence and character should be key to admission- not the color of the applicant’s skin. The University of Texas’ current affirmative action policy is an unfair college admissions process that the Supreme Court should ban so that admissions are based on intellectual ability in high school, national testing scores, extracurricular activities, and community service; this should be changed so that every person,

The Equal Protection Clause derives from the Fourteenth Amendment, which specifies “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…” As a part of the Reconstruction Amendments, the aforementioned clause was meant to ensure racial equality in the Reconstruction Period and has been applied successfully against the affirmative action. Introduced in United States v. Carolene Products Co., the strict scrutiny has been applied to the cases, in which a fundamental constitutional rights have been infringed or a government action applies to a suspect classification (i.e. race, religion, national background). Specifically, in regards to Bakke v. Regents of University of California, the Supreme Court (“the Court”) concluded that, considering that the University of California, Davis received several Caucasian applicants for its special admission program in 1973 and 1974 and that none of the applicants received the admission to the program since the start, the program unfairly administered in favor of minority races and, therefore, violated the rights of the white applicants under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, from Hopwood v. State of Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled under strict scrutiny that, the affirmative action imposed by the University of Texas School of Law (“the law school”) violates the Fourteenth Amendment since neither the law school nor the University of Texas system has proved a proof of

Although the Top 10 Percent Law has only been in effect for approximately two decades, the law signifies historical cases behind it. In short, Texas House Bill 588 was an immediate response to a 1996 federal court case (Barr). In 1991, the law school of University of Texas (UT) initiated a controversial admission strategy, which required distinct standards for white students versus minority students, in order to boost diverse enrollment at the school (Barr). Consequently, this affirmative action was soon criticized as unjust reverse discrimination to Anglo students (Barr). In 1996, rejected applicants filed a lawsuit against the UT – Law school, in which

Question: Did the University of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by practicing an affirmative action policy that resulted in the repeated rejection of Bakke's application for admission to its medical school?

There have been many cases before the United States Supreme Court similar to Mary Hamilton’s, including one that is currently pending. In an ongoing case, Fisher v. University of Texas (2012), Abigail Fisher, a Caucasian female, filed a lawsuit against the University because she was denied admission. Fisher argued that the University was discriminating in its selections based on race. The University argued that the factor of race in the admissions process was solely in the interest of promoting educational diversity. If the admissions of a school call for measures to be taken to ensure diversity, then the policies in place must be reviewed under a standard of strict scrutiny to determine if they are precisely tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest (oyez.org). In Fisher v. University of Texas, the examination of strict scrutiny was not sufficiently conducted and is going to be argued once more on December 9, 2015. In this situation, using the factor of race in an admissions process is

In 1822, Stephen F. Austin established one of the first courts in Texas and appointed a provisional justice of peace. Since Texas was a part of Mexico at the time, the Mexican governor replaced the justice of peace with three elected officials. (Utexas) Soon after Independence, the republic of Texas under the 1836 Constitution, established a supreme court and allowed Congress to create inferior courts. Judges in such courts were to be elected by Congress. Counties, at the time, had County and Justice of Peace courts, whose judges were popularly elected. With the entrance of Texas into the Union and the adoption of numerous constitutions during the period, Texas retained a similar judicial structure. The current 1876 Constitution created a

Issue: Does the University of Texas at Austin’s “race conscious” admissions process violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which says states cannot “deny to any person in its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”? (Amendment XIV)

The case known as Fisher v. University of Texas, was to chosen to be first heard by the Supreme Court in late 2012. It entails a case on affirmative action. Abigail Fisher felt that she had been discriminated against because of her race. She also claimed to have had higher qualifications than her counterparts, and therefore deserved to be admitted into the University of Texas. According to the Washington Post, the suit brought on by Fisher is the first time that the court has revisited affirmative action since its landmark ruling in the 2003

Legal Question: The legal issue presented in this case ultimately questioned the University of Michigan’s admission policy which sought a more diverse student body. The court addressed whether the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in the admission process violated

In the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) case, Allan Bakke, a white applicant, tried applying to medical school twice and was denied, even though his GPA, and test scores were better than others who were recently admitted. According to the court, they believed that “no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race”. Because of this, the shut down the system that discriminated against other races. In the Grutter case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that “Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational

In 1994, a new case, Hopwood v. The University of Texas, was ruled on by the circuit court and interpreted in such a manner as to effectively end affirmative action in higher education for the states of Texas and Louisiana. The plaintiffs for the case were four applicants to the law school of The University of Texas, each of whom were denied admission while minority applicants with lower

& Martinez, 2003). The Supreme Court ruled that the University of California was wrong in the way they approached a special admissions program that was open only to minority applicants (Aguirre Jr. & Martinez, 2003). The ruling argued that the special admissions program violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Aguirre Jr. & Martinez, 2003). Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. stated in his opinion on the Bakke case that quotas “would hinder rather than further attainment of genuine diversity” (Aguirre Jr. & Martinez, 2003, p. 141). Justice Powell, Jr. also wrote that race is only one part of many factors that an institution can consider in truly achieving a heterogeneous student population (Aguirre Jr. & Martinez, 2003). By siding with Bakke in this case, the Supreme Court essentially outlawed the use of racial quotas in admissions processes in higher education, yet universities took this as it is okay to use race as a selective factor as long as there are no quotas (Aguirre Jr. & Martinez, 2003).

Colleges and Universities are still trying to move beyond race-based admissions. In the case of a young woman who applied to the University of Washington who talks about her home life with her father abusing her mother and her mother abusing drugs. This essay from the high school senior impacted the readers into helping to ban affirmative action from university admissions. In February, Florida joined the growing number of states that struck affirmative action from admissions. California in 1996, voters eliminated race-based admissions policies, and the same year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did the same in Texas in Hopwood vs. State of Texas. The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Virginia have elected to significantly reduce the role of

In Hopwood v. Texas, Cheryl Hopwood along with three other caucasian law school applicants challenged the affirmative action program at the University of Texas Law School. She claimed that she was denied admission to the law school despite being better qualified than many admitted minority candidates. Hopwood along with Douglas Carvell, Kenneth Elliott, and David Rogers, all had better combined LSAT and grade scores than 36 of the 43 Latinos admitted, and 16 of the 18 blacks admitted (Hentoff 1). Judge Sparks ruled that the University could continue to use the racial preferences which had been the issue in the case. In the ruling, he wrote that it was "regrettable that affirmative action programs are still needed in our society", and that they were still "a necessity" until society overcomes its tradition of institutional racism (Hopwood V. Texas 1). After the four plaintiffs appealed the case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, "the University of Texas School of Law may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors other than the law school"( Hopwood V. Texas 1). The University appealed the decision, but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review, making the case the law of the land in Louisiana, Mississippi, and