Almost four decades after the Supreme Court ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , the diversity rationale for affirmative action in public education remains a topic of political and legal controversy. Many colleges and universities have implemented affirmative action policies not only to remedy past discrimination, but also to achieve a racially and ethnically diverse student body or faculty. Justice Powell, in his opinion for the Bakke Court, stated that the attainment of a diverse student body is "a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education," noting that "[t]he atmosphere of 'speculation, experiment, and creation' so essential to the quality of higher education is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body." In subsequent years, however, federal courts began to question the Powell rationale, unsettling expectations about whether diversity-based affirmative action in educational admissions and faculty hiring decisions is constitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In striking down the admissions process at the University of Texas School of Law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Hopwood v. Texas concluded that any use of race in the admissions process was forbidden by the Constitution. Reverberations of the 1996 Hopwood opinion are apparent in several subsequent cases, which voided race-conscious policies maintained by institutions of higher education, as well as public elementary and secondary schools. Some judges avoided resolving the precedential effect of Justice Powell's opinion by deciding the case on other grounds not dependent on the constitutional status of student diversity as a compelling state interest. But, in Johnson v. Board of Regents , the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Hopwood by rejecting diversity as constitutional justification for a numerical "racial bonus" awarded minority freshman applicants to the University of Georgia. A circuit court conflict was created when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit relied on Bakke to uphold an affirmative action admissions policy to the University of Washington Law School that made extensive use of race-based factors. Smith v. University of Washington was the first federal appeals court to rely on Justice Powell's decision as binding precedent on the issue. The judicial divide over Bakke 's legacy was vividly underscored by a pair of separate trial court decisions, one upholding for diversity reasons the race-based undergraduate admissions policy of the University of Michigan, the other voiding a special minority law school admissions program at the same institution. Restoring a degree of clarity to the law, the Supreme Court concluded its 2002 term with rulings in the Michigan cases. In Grutter v. Bollinger , a 5 to 4 majority of the Justices held that the law school had a compelling interest in the "educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body," which justified its consideration of race in admissions to assemble a "critical mass" of underrepresented minority students. But in a companion decision, Gratz v. Bollinger , six Justices decided that the university's policy of awarding racial bonus points to minority applicants was not narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional scrutiny. However, the Grutter and Gratz decisions did not address whether diversity is a permissible goal in the elementary and secondary educational setting. To resolve this question, the Court agreed to review two cases that involved the use of race to maintain racially diverse public schools. The cases were Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education —formerly MacFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schools —and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 . In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 , a consolidated 2007 ruling that resolved both cases, the Court ultimately struck down the school plans at issue, holding that they violated the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. More recently, the Court's decision to hear challenges in two separate affirmative action cases has once again revived the issue of diversity in higher education. In its 2013 ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin , the Court reaffirmed its holding in Grutter , but nevertheless vacated and remanded an appellate court's decision to uphold a race-conscious undergraduate admissions plan at the University of Texas at Austin. However, on remand, the appellate court upheld the university's admissions program for a second time, a decision that appeared to prompt the Court to agree to review the case yet again during its 2015 term. Meanwhile, in 2014's Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action , the Court upheld Michigan's Proposal 2, which prohibits the use of racial preferences in higher education. The first part of this report briefly reviews the judicial evolution of race-based affirmative action, particularly in relation to public education. The report then reviews major rulings involving challenges to the use of race-conscious admissions, and concludes with a discussion of the implications for the future of affirmative action law. The origins of affirmative action law may be traced to the early 1960s as first the Warren, and then the Burger Court, grappled with the seemingly intractable problem of racial segregation in the nation's public schools. Judicial rulings from this period recognized an "affirmative duty," cast upon local school boards by the equal protection clause, to desegregate formerly "dual school" systems and to eliminate "root and branch" the last "vestiges" of state-enforced segregation. These holdings ushered in a two-decade era of massive desegregation—first in the South, and later the urban North—marked by federal desegregation orders frequently requiring drastic reconfiguration of school attendance patterns along racial lines and extensive student transportation schemes. School districts across the nation operating under these decrees have since sought to be declared in compliance with constitutional requirements in order to gain release from federal intervention. The Supreme Court eventually responded by holding that judicial control of a school system previously found guilty of intentional segregation should be relinquished if, looking to all aspects of school operations, it appears that the district has complied with desegregation requirements in "good faith" for a "reasonable period of time" and has eliminated "vestiges" of past discrimination "to the extent practicable." A statutory framework for affirmative action in employment and education was enacted by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Public and private employers with 15 or more employees are subject to a comprehensive code of equal employment opportunity regulations under Title VII of the 1964 act. The Title VII remedial scheme rests largely on judicial power to order monetary damages and injunctive relief, including "such affirmative action as may be appropriate," to make discrimination victims whole. Except as may be imposed by court order or consent decree to remedy past discrimination, however, there is no general statutory obligation on employers to adopt affirmative action remedies. But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has issued guidelines to protect employers and unions from charges of "reverse discrimination" when they voluntarily take action to correct the effects of past discrimination. The term "affirmative action" resurfaced in federal regulations construing the 1964 act's Title VI, which prohibits racial or ethnic discrimination in all federally assisted programs or activities, including public or private educational institutions. The Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education interpreted Title VI to require schools and colleges to take affirmative action to overcome the effects of past discrimination and to encourage "voluntary affirmative action to attain a diverse student body." Another Title VI regulation permits a college or university to take racial or national origin into account when awarding financial aid if the aid is necessary to overcome effects of past institutional discrimination. Affirmative action in higher education also came before Congress in 1998, when the full House defeated a bill to prohibit federal aid to colleges and universities that consider race, ethnicity, or sex in the admission process. The Bakke ruling in 1978 launched the contemporary constitutional debate over state-sponsored affirmative action. A "notable lack of unanimity" was evident from the six separate opinions filed in that case. One four-Justice plurality in Bakke voted to strike down as a violation of Title VI a special admissions program of the University of California at Davis medical school which set aside 16 of 100 positions in each incoming class for minority students, though the institution itself was not shown to have discriminated in the past. Another bloc of four Justices argued that racial classifications designed to further remedial purposes were foreclosed neither by the Constitution nor the Civil Rights Act and would have upheld the minority admissions quota. Justice Powell added a fifth vote to each camp by condemning the Davis program on equal protection grounds, while endorsing the nonexclusive consideration of race as an admissions criterion to foster student diversity. In Justice Powell's view, neither the state's asserted interest in remedying societal discrimination, nor of providing role models for minority students was sufficiently compelling to warrant the use of a suspect racial classification in the admission process. But the attainment of a "diverse student body" was, for Justice Powell, "clearly a permissible goal for an institution of higher education" since diversity of minority viewpoints furthered "academic freedom," a "special concern of the First Amendment." Accordingly, race could be considered by a university as a "plus" or "one element of a range of factors"—even if it "tipped the scale" among qualified applicants—as long as it "did not insulate the individual from comparison with all the other candidates for the available seats." The "quota" in Bakke was infirm, however, since it defined diversity only in racial terms and absolutely excluded non-minorities from a given number of seats. By two 5-to-4 votes, therefore, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court order admitting Bakke but reversed the judicial ban on consideration of race in admissions. Bakke was followed by Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education , where a divided Court ruled unconstitutional the provision of a collective bargaining agreement that protected minority public school teachers from layoff at the expense of more senior white faculty members.