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36  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
Opinion of the Court 

constitutional  provision  whose  central  command  is  equal-
ity.”  Id., at 506. 

The dissents here do not acknowledge any of this.  They
fail to cite Hunt.  They fail to cite Croson.  They fail to men-
tion that the entirety of their analysis of the Equal Protec-
tion Clause—the statistics, the cases, the history—has been
considered and rejected before.  There is a reason the prin-
cipal dissent must invoke Justice Marshall’s partial dissent 
in  Bakke  nearly  a  dozen  times  while  mentioning  Justice 
(JUSTICE 
controlling  opinion  barely  once 
Powell’s 
JACKSON’s opinion ignores Justice Powell altogether).  For 
what one dissent denigrates as “rhetorical flourishes about
colorblindness,” post, at 14 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.), are
in fact the proud pronouncements of cases like Loving and 
Yick Wo, like Shelley and Bolling—they are defining state-
ments of law.  We understand the dissents want that law to 
be  different.  They  are  entitled  to  that  desire.    But  they 
surely cannot claim the mantle of stare decisis while pursu-
ing it.8 

The  dissents  are  no  more  faithful  to  our  precedent  on
race-based admissions.  To hear the principal dissent tell it, 
Grutter blessed such programs indefinitely, until “racial in-
equality will end.”  Post, at 54 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). 
But Grutter did no such thing.  It emphasized—not once or 
twice, but at least six separate times—that race-based ad-

—————— 

8 Perhaps recognizing as much, the principal dissent at one point at-
tempts  to  press  a  different  remedial  rationale  altogether,  stating  that 
both respondents “have sordid legacies of racial exclusion.”  Post, at 21 
(opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.).  Such institutions should perhaps be the very 
last  ones  to  be  allowed  to  make  race-based  decisions,  let  alone  be  ac-
corded deference in doing so.  In any event, neither university defends
its admissions system as a remedy for past discrimination—their own or 
anyone  else’s.    See  Tr.  of  Oral  Arg.  in  No.  21–707,  at  90  (“[W]e’re  not 
pursuing any sort of remedial justification for our policy.”).  Nor has any
decision of ours permitted a remedial justification for race-based college
admissions.  Cf. Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.).