Affirmative Action Admissions Regimes are Unconstitutional: Strict Scrutiny Should Mean Something

By Myles McKnight & Benjamin Edelson — Harvard’s affirmative action saga continues, or so we hope. After losses in the Federal District Court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the non-profit group seeking to do away with Harvard’s race-obsessed admissions regime has filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in our Nation’s highest tribunal. Students for Fair Admissions petitions the Court to consider overruling Grutter v. Bollinger, the narrow 2003 decision which held that the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious admissions program was constitutional because it satisfied strict scrutiny. Grutter’s loose reasoning leads us to think that the Court should overrule, so we’ll canvass just one reason for believing so here.