## Facts

- Four white applicants (including Cheryl J. Hopwood) were denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law and challenged the school’s race-conscious admissions practices under the Equal Protection Clause.
- The admissions system evaluated certain minority applicants in a separate pool and used lower presumptive admission cutoffs for minority applicants based on an index combining LSAT and GPA.
- The district court upheld the use of racial preferences, finding remedial and diversity justifications sufficient.
- The Fifth Circuit reversed, holding the admissions policy unconstitutional; it rejected diversity as a compelling interest and required any remedial rationale to be tied to the institution’s own specific, recent discrimination.
- Texas and university officials petitioned for certiorari seeking review of the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning, while representing that the challenged 1992 admissions program had been discontinued and would not be reinstated.

## Issues

1. Whether the Supreme Court should grant certiorari to review the Fifth Circuit’s constitutional analysis of race-conscious law school admissions when the challenged admissions program had been abandoned and was not defended before the Court.
2. Whether the case presented a sufficiently live controversy and adequate record to justify Supreme Court review of the broader constitutional question.

## Decision

- Certiorari was denied, leaving the Fifth Circuit’s judgment in place without Supreme Court resolution of the merits of affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
- Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Souter, issued an opinion respecting the denial.
- The opinion emphasized that the Court “reviews judgments, not opinions,” and does not grant review to address abstract disagreement with lower-court reasoning.
- Because the challenged program had long been discontinued and petitioners did not defend it, the controversy over that program was not a suitable vehicle for decision.
- The record was inadequate to assess any then-current admissions practice; the Court should await a final judgment involving a program genuinely in controversy.

## Legal Principles

- Denial of certiorari leaves the lower court’s judgment intact but does not imply Supreme Court approval of the lower court’s reasoning.
- The Supreme Court generally declines review when the dispute over the challenged governmental program is no longer live or when the petitioner seeks review of rationale untethered to an operative policy.
- The Court prefers to decide major constitutional questions on a developed record concerning a current, contested program rather than in a posture that risks an advisory opinion.

## Conclusion

The Court declined to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision striking down a law school’s race-conscious admissions policy because the challenged program had been abandoned and the record did not support review of any current policy, leaving the lower-court judgment in place without resolving the broader constitutional question.


Texas v. Hopwood, 518 U.S. 1033 (1996)