Bass, Berry & Sims attorney Audrey Anderson spoke with host June Grasso on the Bloomberg Law podcast to examine the dismissal of the case contesting the race-conscious admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin. The case was filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) representing interests of two of its members – white students who were denied admission.
“In this case, it was a second case that had been brought against the University of Texas at Austin challenging their race-conscious admissions policies for undergraduate students. The University of Texas had been sued earlier in the 2008/2009 timeframe about their race-conscious student admissions policy. And that case went all the way to the Supreme Court, not once but twice. This suit was a follow-on suit that was filed within the last couple of years challenging those student admissions practices again,” Audrey explained. Audrey speculated that this case was brought again now, despite no changes in the University of Texas admissions practice, because the make-up of the Supreme Court has changed since the previous case. In that earlier case – Fisher v. University of Texas – the Supreme Court ruled the University of Texas at Austin’s race-conscious admissions practices were constitutional.
“One of the things that SFFA is trying to do is to get appellate decisions from different courts of appeals around the country that are in conflict with one another because that is the best way to get the Supreme Court to be interested in your case. Their ultimate goal is to get the Supreme Court to look at this question that was decided in Fisher and that was decided in the Michigan cases – Grutter and Gratz – to look at that question again and hold that actually the constitution does not allow colleges and universities to take race into account when admitting students to their schools and programs,” explained Audrey.
The full podcast was released on July 31 and is available online here or wherever you get your podcast content. Audrey’s interview begins at 13:50. To read more about the impact of this case, read Audrey’s analysis here.