University of California v. Bakke
The contentious issue of affirmative action in college admissions was tackled by the U.S. Supreme Court in University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 landmark decision that allowed selective admissions based on ethnicity.
The question before the Court was whether individual students were being denied equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Justices lobbied one another in attempts to persuade each other to vote in a specific way.
The decision of the court in this case is complex, with six justices writing opinions and agreeing on portions of the matter. In general, they sided with Bakke, saying that the school admissions policy was slanted too far in favor of minority applicants, but they also largely agreed that some affirmative action in admissions is beneficial to the institutions.
The decision split the Supreme Court, with a slim (5-4) majority striking down the university’s practice of setting aside a specific number of admissions (quota) for racial minorities yet upholding affirmative action arrived at by other means. California residents voted in 1996 to ban race-based admissions policies in state schools.
Bakke was an armed services veteran who sought to attend medical school but was denied admission to University of California. He sued the state for admission, claiming that affirmative action policies unfairly favored ethnic and racial minority applicants over him. The California Supreme Court sided with Bakke, striking down the school’s admission policy and ordering him admitted as a student.
The U.S. Supreme Court had previously taken up a similar case, DeFunis v. Odegaard, in 1974, in which a prospective law student had complained of unequal admissions policies at University of Washington. A state court forced his admission and the state Supreme Court was sympathetic with the school’s goals but critical of its admissions process for minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the case but decided it was moot because DeFunis would graduate before a decision was rendered.