Issue of the case

This case was brought before the Supreme Court after it was requested by Grutter, and the Center for Individual Rights. Two courts had made opposing decisions and so the Supreme Court agreed to look over the case and hear the arguments. Grutter had won in the District Court, however, in the Sixth Circuit court, she had lost.

“This case presents questions about what constitutes a compelling interest that may justify race-based preferences in student admissions at a state law school to applicants from certain racial or ethnic groups. The Sixth Circuit resolved this issue by concluding that the opinion of Justice Powell in Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), constituted binding precedent establishing "diversity" as such a compelling governmental interest. The Fifth, Ninth, Eleventh, and Sixth Circuits have split on this issue of profound national importance. The First and Fourth Circuits, in cases involving racial preferences in admissions to public elementary and secondary schools, have issued opinions noting uncertainty about whether diversity is an interest sufficiently compelling to justify such preferences.

Even assuming "diversity" to be a compelling interest, this case presents additional questions concerning what constitutes appropriate "narrow tailoring" of an admissions policy designed to achieve diversity. The decision of the Sixth Circuit conflicts with the approach to narrow tailoring taken by this Court and by other lower courts. The Sixth Circuit's de novo review of the district court's factual findings concerning the racial preferences at issue was also an extraordinary departure from the rule that such findings should be reviewed under a "clearly erroneous" standard. “

(http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/02-241/02-241.pet.html)


The problem was that the University of Michigan Law School said that they wanted diversity on their campus. However, when actual numbers were looked at, African-American’s, Native Americans, and Hispanics were not equal in any sense of the word.

“In practice, the Law School's program bears little or no relation to its asserted goal of achieving "critical mass." Respondents explain that the Law School seeks to accumulate a "critical mass" of each underrepresented minority group. The Law School's ... current policy ... provides a special commitment to enrolling a 'critical mass' of 'Hispanics'. But the record demonstrates that the Law School's admissions practices with respect to these groups differ dramatically and cannot be defended under any consistent use of the term "critical mass."

9http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=02-241#dissent1)

The point of this case was to determine whether or not the University could select a person over another person based on race, to avoid discrimination. The University argued that this wasn’t the only thing they used to determine who was admitted. They used a point system to add up all attributes.