Students for Fair Admissions and the End of Racial Classification as We Know It

My article, College students for Honest Admissions and the Finish of Racial Classification as We Know It, will probably be printed within the new Cato Supreme Court docket Evaluation on Monday. Right here is the summary:

The Supreme Court docket’s choice in College students for Honest Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard School (SFFA) possible marks the start of the top of the overt use of race in college admissions. The Court docket’s choice, nonetheless, has a lot broader implications.

Harvard College and the College of North Carolina (UNC) labeled candidates based mostly on racial and ethnic classes adopted by the federal authorities within the Nineteen Seventies. SFFA concluded that these classifications have been so arbitrary as to be unconstitutional. SFFA due to this fact presents a broad new avenue of assault for litigants difficult racial preferences and different race-based insurance policies based mostly on these ubiquitous classifications. Any entity that’s sued for partaking in discriminatory preferences or for in any other case allocating items or providers by race might want to clarify why the racial classifications they depend on do not fail the arbitrariness take a look at.

Half I of this text briefly critiques the historical past of the usage of racial preferences by universities beginning within the Nineteen Sixties.

Half II of this text discusses how the SFFA case disrupted a comfy establishment, by which universities pretended to abide by the constraints the Court docket had imposed on the usage of racial preferences and the Supreme Court docket pretended to not discover that universities have been ignoring these limitations.

Half III of this text notes that, for the primary time, a Supreme Court docket majority has concluded that the usual racial classifications utilized by universities and plenty of different establishments are arbitrary and incoherent. Because of this many different makes use of of racial classifications past college admissions are out of the blue extra susceptible to authorized problem.

That’s the topic of Half IV of this text. It discusses potential challenges to the usage of race-based preferences in authorities contracting; to the obligatory use of racial classifications in biomedical analysis; and to the arbitrary requirements the federal government makes use of to categorise individuals as American Indians.