Docket 76-811
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
DecidedJun 28, 1978
5-4decision
Source: CourtListener.
Court allows race-conscious university admissions but strikes down fixed racial quota system
What it does
The ruling strikes down UC Davis Medical School's program of reserving 16 of 100 seats exclusively for designated minority applicants, ordering the rejected white applicant admitted, while simultaneously holding that race may still be considered as one factor among many in university admissions to achieve student body diversity. It reverses the lower court's blanket injunction against any consideration of race in admissions.
Who benefits
The individual applicant excluded from competing for a fixed number of seats because of his race benefits from being ordered admitted; more broadly, universities retain the ability to consider race as one factor in admissions to pursue diversity.
Who is affected
Universities operating rigid racial quota or set-aside admissions systems must abandon them, while minority applicants lose the specific guarantee of a fixed number of reserved seats, though they may still benefit from race being weighed as a plus factor in holistic review.
Practical impact
Universities may continue using race as a "plus factor" in holistic admissions review modeled on the Harvard approach, but must abandon numerical quotas or set-aside seats insulated from competition with all other applicants. Allan Bakke was ordered admitted to UC Davis Medical School, and the decision became the controlling framework for university affirmative action admissions litigation for decades afterward.
Majority reasoning
Justice Powell, writing the controlling opinion, reasoned that the Equal Protection Clause protects individual persons, not groups, so any racial classification—benign or not—must survive strict scrutiny by serving a compelling interest through the least restrictive means. He rejected reducing "societal discrimination" as a justification because it is too amorphous and lacks the judicial, legislative, or administrative findings needed to justify race-based remedies, and rejected the physician-shortage and health-care-delivery rationales for lack of evidentiary support. He accepted that attaining a diverse student body is a constitutionally permissible goal protected by academic freedom under the First Amendment, but held the Davis program's fixed quota was not necessary to achieve that goal because the Harvard-type approach of treating race as one flexible "plus" factor among many, without insulating any seats from competition, could achieve diversity without excluding any applicant from competing for all seats. On Title VI, he found it unnecessary to resolve whether a private right of action exists, assuming one for purposes of the case, and read Title VI's ban on race discrimination as coextensive with the Equal Protection Clause.
Dissent reasoning
Justice Stevens, joined by Chief Justice Burger, Justice Stewart, and Justice Rehnquist, concurred in the judgment ordering Bakke's admission but dissented from any discussion of the constitutional question, arguing the Court should have decided the case solely on Title VI's plain language, which flatly bars excluding any person from a federally funded program on account of race, without qualification for benign intent. They argued the University conceded it could not prove Bakke would have been rejected absent the special program, so the case was resolved by statute alone, and that reaching the equal protection question when a statutory ground was dispositive violated the Court's practice of avoiding unnecessary constitutional rulings. To the extent the plurality opinion (Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun) purported to establish that universities may generally use race in admissions, Stevens would not join or endorse that holding as binding law beyond the judgment itself.
Constitutional question
Whether a state medical school's special admissions program that reserved a fixed number of seats for minority applicants violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Precedent changed
The ruling did not overrule prior precedent but distinguished Lau v. Nichols and United Jewish Organizations v. Carey, limiting their reach as remedial-finding cases rather than general authorizations for race-based preferences.