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This is Abigail Fisher.
No, hold on. This is Abigail Fisher.
She applied to the University of Texas with a 3.59 and an 1180 SAT in 2008, and they didn’t let her in.
She filed a lawsuit, saying U Texas was all:
…racially discriminating against her, a white girl, because other, minority students, had been admitted with lower quality applications.
U Texas won, and she appealed.
PRECEDENT BREAK: the relevant case here is Grutter v. Bollinger, which says affirmative action (the consideration of race [and since, other diversity-achieving factors in school admissions]) is legit.
The reasoning in Grutter was that schools have an interest in maintaining diversity.
The ruling in Fisher changes that a little, by changing the legal test that an affirmative action program must pass in order to be kosher under the law: the “strict scrutiny” test.
It narrows the standard, requiring lower courts to OK the use of race in their admissions programs as a way to achieve diversity.
They have to establish that there is no other non-racially focused factor that would also create a diverse student body.
SCOTUS sent the case back to the lower court to rule on U Texas’s program.
Meanwhile, Fisher has graduated from LSU.
So, affirmative action lives on, but with a little more supervision.
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