Facts
- Cheryl Hopwood, Douglas Carvell, Kenneth Elliott, and David Rogers—White Texas residents—applied to the University of Texas School of Law (UT Law) for the 1992 entering class and were denied admission.
- UT Law considered race in admissions to increase enrollment of Mexican American and African American students and to obtain a more racially mixed class.
- UT Law assigned each applicant a “Texas Index” (TI), combining undergraduate GPA and LSAT score, and used TI to place applicants into three categories: presumptive admit, presumptive deny, or a discretionary middle zone.
- UT Law used lower TI cutoffs for Mexican American and African American applicants than for White applicants and other nonpreferred applicants, meaning some preferred-minority applicants could be admitted with TI scores that would have resulted in presumptive denial for White applicants.
- UT Law also reviewed preferred-minority files differently by using a minority subcommittee that discussed each preferred-minority candidate individually.
- UT Law stated goals included increasing minority enrollment and seeking a class with about 10% Mexican American and 5% African American students, consistent with enrollment patterns at other Texas colleges.
- The denied applicants sued the State of Texas and UT officials, alleging that UT Law’s admissions process treated them differently because of race in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI.
- The district court ruled for the plaintiffs on liability but accepted two asserted justifications as legitimate in its analysis: (1) the educational value of a diverse student body and (2) remedying the continuing effects of past discrimination.
- The district court upheld the race-adjusted TI ranges but struck down the use of separate admissions committees, and it did not order that the denied applicants be admitted.
- The denied applicants appealed, challenging the parts of the judgment that left any race-based mechanism in place and disputing the scope of relief.
Issues
- Whether UT Law’s use of race in admissions—through different TI thresholds and related procedures for Mexican American and African American applicants—violated the Equal Protection Clause.
- Whether the admissions program also violated Title VI’s ban on race discrimination in federally funded education programs.
- Whether obtaining the educational benefits of student-body diversity, as described in Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, constituted a compelling interest authorizing UT Law’s race-based admissions choices.
- Whether UT Law had a sufficiently specific remedial justification—tied to identified discrimination within UT Law’s authority to remedy—to justify the racial classifications.
- What relief and prospective limits were appropriate if the admissions program was unlawful.
Decision
- The Fifth Circuit held that UT Law could not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit and that the challenged admissions program was unlawful.
- Applying strict scrutiny, the court rejected “diversity” as a compelling interest in this circuit as UT Law asserted it, reasoning that Justice Powell’s solo opinion in Bakke was not binding Supreme Court precedent on that point.
- The court also rejected UT Law’s remedial rationale on this record, concluding the law school had not shown a strong evidentiary basis of specific past discrimination by UT Law that would justify race-based admissions.
- Because Title VI is applied coextensively with equal protection standards for a public university’s admissions decisions, the program’s unlawfulness under the Equal Protection Clause meant it also violated Title VI.
- The court reversed the district court to the extent it sustained the race-based TI adjustments and remanded for further proceedings, including reconsideration of appropriate relief consistent with the opinion.
Legal Principles
- Explicit racial classifications by a public law school in admissions trigger strict scrutiny and are unconstitutional unless the school proves a compelling governmental interest and narrow tailoring.
- Generalized claims of societal discrimination or racial imbalance do not justify race-based admissions; remedial use of race requires a specific showing of discrimination that the institution caused or has authority to remedy.
- A program that sets different admissions thresholds and review processes based on race constitutes unequal treatment and is highly suspect under the Equal Protection Clause.
- In this decision, the Fifth Circuit declined to treat Justice Powell’s Bakke diversity rationale as controlling authority and therefore declined to recognize diversity (as asserted here) as a compelling interest in the circuit.
- For federally funded public universities, Title VI’s prohibition on race discrimination reaches the same core conduct barred by the Equal Protection Clause in admissions decisions, so the constitutional analysis largely controls the statutory outcome.
Conclusion
The Fifth Circuit concluded that UT Law’s admissions scheme—using race-based TI cutoffs and related procedures that advantaged Mexican American and African American applicants over White applicants—failed strict scrutiny because UT Law lacked a legally sufficient compelling interest on this record, and the program therefore violated both the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI; the court reversed the district court’s partial approval of the policy and remanded for further relief proceedings consistent with that holding.