"The Waning of Racial Preferences at American Law Schools, 2021-2025," by My UCLA Colleague Rick Sander |
Affirmative Action
Eugene Volokh | 1.16.2026 8:32 AM
From this new draft, cowritten by Prof. Sander and Henry Kim:
In June 2023, the Supreme Court broadly held that colleges and universities could not confer an admissions advantage to an applicant on the basis of the applicant's race. The ruling was fairly clear, but its likely effects were not. There were two major uncertainties. Would the institutions that had been using large racial preferences for decades actually change their practices in a substantive way? And if they did, would Black and Hispanic enrollments at elite colleges and professional schools crash?
The schools themselves were not forthcoming about their plans, aside from generally expressing a determination to preserve diversity. Higher education leaders had long maintained two conflicting precepts: first, that their admissions officers took account of race to only a modest degree, but second, that........