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Page Number: 43

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

35 

Opinion of the Court 

both  opinions  are  thorough  and  thoughtful  in  many  re-
spects, this Court has long rejected their core thesis. 

The  dissents’  interpretation  of  the  Equal  Protection 
Clause is not new.  In Bakke, four Justices would have per-
mitted  race-based  admissions  programs  to  remedy  the  ef-
fects of societal discrimination.  438 U. S., at 362 (joint opin-
ion  of  Brennan,  White,  Marshall,  and  Blackmun,  JJ., 
concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part).  But 
that minority view was just that—a minority view.  Justice 
Powell, who provided the fifth vote and controlling opinion 
in Bakke, firmly rejected the notion that societal discrimi-
nation constituted a compelling interest.  Such an interest 
presents “an amorphous concept of injury that may be age-
less in its reach into the past,” he explained.  Id., at 307.  It 
cannot “justify a [racial] classification that imposes disad-
vantages  upon  persons  . . .  who  bear  no  responsibility  for 
whatever harm the beneficiaries of the [race-based] admis-
sions program are thought to have suffered.”  Id., at 310. 

The Court  soon adopted Justice Powell’s analysis as its 
own.  In the years after Bakke, the Court repeatedly held
that  ameliorating  societal  discrimination  does  not  consti-
tute a compelling interest that justifies race-based state ac-
tion.  “[A]n effort to alleviate the effects of societal discrim-
ination  is  not  a  compelling  interest,”  we  said  plainly  in 
Hunt, a 1996 case about the Voting Rights Act.  517 U. S., 
at 909–910.  We reached the same conclusion in Croson, a 
case that concerned a preferential government contracting 
program.  Permitting  “past  societal  discrimination”  to 
“serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to 
open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief ’ for 
every  disadvantaged  group.”    488  U. S.,  at  505.    Opening
that door would shutter another—“[t]he dream of a Nation 
of equal citizens . . . would be lost,” we observed, “in a mo-
saic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasur-
able claims of past wrongs.”  Id., at 505–506.  “[S]uch a re-
sult  would  be  contrary  to  both  the  letter  and  spirit  of  a