On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court bowed to pressure from anti-civil rights activists, finding that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This radical decision comes at a time when efforts to advance opportunity in education have been under attack across the country, and the need for such programs remains acute. The Court’s decision is contrary to 45 years of precedent established in prior Supreme Court decisions, including Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. Bollinger, and Fisher v. University of Texas. However, the Court’s ruling still allows colleges to consider how race has affected a student’s life and their ability to contribute to the educational institution. Read the full statement here.

There is strong support among Harvard students and alumni for the school’s use of holistic admissions to foster diversity on campus. That’s why twenty-six Harvard student and alumni organizations, comprised of thousands of Asian American, Black, Latinx, Native American, and white students and alumni have joined together to submit “friend of the court” briefs condemning the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) lawsuit that seeks to eliminate the consideration of race in admissions, thereby threatening diversity at colleges nationwide. The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and local counsel Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak, & Cohen, P.C. represent these organizations in their quest to protect holistic admissions. Other allied organizations involved in the litigation include The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Lawyers for Civil Rights, and their pro bono counsel Arnold & Porter LLP.

Listen as LDF Director of Strategic Initiatives, Jin Hee Lee, discusses SFFA v. Harvard on ACLU’s At Liberty.

SFFA, an organization led by well-known anti-civil rights activist Edward Blum, filed this lawsuit in 2014 as a part of his relentless crusade to ban the consideration of race in admissions. Blum’s coordinated campaign against holistic admissions includes the landmark case Fisher v. University of Texas – in which the court upheld the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions practices – and current litigation against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin. Blum has orchestrated attacks on civil rights from the classroom to the ballot box and was also the architect behind Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Supreme Court gutted the seminal Voting Rights Act.  

The students and alumni represented by LDF believe that eliminating race from college admissions would greatly decrease diversity on campus, and force students of color to hide a key part of their identity, as racial and cultural heritage are often inextricably intertwined with the experiences prospective students want to include in their applications. 

On September 30, 2019, Judge Allison Burroughs of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled in Harvard’s favor and affirmed that the university’s consideration of race as one of many factors in undergraduate admissions decisions is consistent with – and supported by – longstanding United States Supreme Court law. The ruling was an important victory in the ongoing struggle for equal opportunity in higher education and reaffirmed that racial diversity is vitally important to each student’s education. On February 18, 2020, SFFA filed their opening brief appealing the district court’s decision.  

LDF Client, Aba Sam (Harvard Class of 2021), discusses the importance of diverse classrooms