The Supreme Court’s decision to hear a case that could doom university policies considering race as a factor in student admissions is the latest sign of the conservative majority’s eagerness to put its stamp on United States’ most divisive issues.
The court already was due to issue rulings by the end of June in cases giving the justices a chance to curtail abortion rights and widen gun rights — major goals of conservatives. The case targeting the student admissions practices of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, taken up by the court on Monday, gives the conservative justices a chance to weaken affirmative action policies long despised by the right, with a ruling expected next year.
The court has become increasingly assertive since the addition of former President Donald Trump’s third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, in 2020 gave the nation’s top judicial body a 6-3 conservative majority. Her appointment changed the court’s dynamics by marginalizing Chief Justice John Roberts, considered an incrementalist conservative.
“This particular six-justice majority seems willing to push ahead in an aggressively conservative direction on multiple fronts, without feeling the need to be moderated by concepts of judicial restraint, stare decisis, or incrementalism,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Washington, D.C.-based Constitutional Accountability Center advocacy group. Stare decisis is the legal doctrine of respecting precedents.
Based on oral arguments held last year, the court’s conservatives seem poised, in a case from Mississippi, to undermine or even overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide and, in a case from New York, expand the right to carry firearms in public.
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