Students for Fair Admissions Files Appeal to U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina
ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed a petition for a writ of certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
The UNC case is a companion to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard University, No. 20-1199. Both cases were filed on the same day in 2014.
The Harvard case challenges racial preferences at the nation’s oldest private college, and this case challenges racial preferences at the nation’s oldest public college. The Harvard case asks this Court to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger and hold that Title VI forbids federal funding recipients from using race in admissions.
This case asks the Court to recognize that, for public schools, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of racial neutrality compels the same conclusion. Certiorari before judgment is appropriate here for the same reasons it was in Gratz v. Bollinger, the companion case to Grutter that was argued and decided on the same day.
Like Harvard, UNC is devoted to using race indefinitely and at every stage of its admissions process. The district court—after seven years of litigation and an eight-day trial—upheld UNC’s system under a version of strict scrutiny that was anything but.
Edward Blum, president of SFFA, said, “It is our hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant both the Harvard and the University of North Carolina admissions cases for argument.”
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