声音简介
John G. Roberts, Jr.
I have the opinion for the court this morning in case number 20-1199, Students for Fair Admissions versus the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and case number 21-707, Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina.
These cases involve the admissions systems used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.
Both schools acknowledge that they use race as one factor in making their admissions decisions, and that race is a decisive factor for some of the students that they admit.
The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC's programs are permissible under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
We conclude that they are not.
In the wake of the Civil War, Congress proposed and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment providing that not state shall ?deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.?
To its proponents the Equal Protection Clause represented a foundational principle.
As Representative John Bingham put it, the absolute equality of all citizens of the United States politically and civilly before their own laws; or to quote Representative Thaddeus Stevens, ?any law which operates upon one man should operate equally upon all.?
Or as Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan explained during the amendment's passage in Congress, the Equal Protection Clause would give to the humblest and poorest of the Black race the same rights and the same protection before the law as it gives to the most powerful or the most wealthy.
Many of this Court's decisions issued shortly after the Equal Protection Clause's adoption, understood its broad and transformative sweep.
In 1880, for example, we explain the clause promise that ?the law in the states shall be the same for the black as for the white that all persons whether black or white shall stand equal before the laws of the states.?
And in 1886, we explained that the Equal Protection Clause applies without regard to any differences of race, or color, or of nationality.
It is universal in its application.
Now as anyone familiar with American history knows however for many years thereafter the Equal Protection Clause failed to live up to its full promise.
Jim Crow Laws and decisions of this court upholding them meant that state enforced discrimination continued in many parts of America for decades.
It was a sad and egregious chapter in our nation's history.
It was not until 1954, more than 80 years after the adoption of the Equal Protection Clause, that things began to fundamentally change.
That year, we issued one of the most important decisions that this court has ever reached, Brown versus Board of Education.
The case concerned segregation in local schools.
The school board in the case had argued that such segregation was permissible because while black students and white students were separated, the quality of the educational facilities each received were allegedly equal.
We unanimously rejected that argument.
Separate but equal, we explained, was inherently unequal.
As the court put it, the right to a public education must be made available to all on equal terms, and that was so, as the plaintiffs in the case had argued, because no state has any authority under the Equal Protection Clause to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.
In the years that followed our seminal decision in Brown, this court repeatedly struck down state laws that treated people differently because of the color of their skin.
But both Harvard and UNC acknowledge that for some students they admit race is a determinative factor.
For those students who are no doubt talented and accomplished race is what makes the difference, just as it makes the difference for whichever applicant was rejected in their place.
This court first considered whether universities could use race as a factor in admissions in 1978 in a case called Regents of University of California versus Bakke.
The case produced six different opinions, none of which commanded a majority of the court.
But one opinion written by Justice Powell for himself alone would come to server as the touchstone for race based admission policies going forward.
Justice Powell explained that such policies could not be sustained on the ground that they remedy general discrimination against minority groups, nor could such a program be upheld based on the need to fix the deficit of minority students on university campuses.
Instead he explained, universities could only consider race to ensure that students received what he called the educational benefits of diversity.
In 2003, 25 years after Bakke, we considered the issue again in the case Grutter versus Bollinger.
There in a splinter decision, a majority of the court for the first time held that universities could make race based admissions decisions to pursue the educational benefits of diversity.
While doing so, however, the court in Grutter expressed serious concerns about the use of race in college admissions.
We explained that there are serious problems of justice connected with the idea of racial preference itself, and we observe that all racial classifications, however compelling their goals, were dangerous.
That was so, Grutter explained, because racial preferences offend the fundamental equal protection principle at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.
For that reason, Grutter imposed one critical limit on race based admission programs.
At some point, the court held, they must end.
The court made this important point six different times in six different ways.
All race conscious admission programs must have a termination point, it explained.
They must have reasonable durational limits.
They must be limited in time.
They must have sunset provisions.
They must have a logical endpoint, and their deviation from the norm of equal treatment must be a temporary matter.
The importance of the endpoint was not just a matter of repetition.
It was the reason the court was willing to let universities continue to act contrary to the constitution's unambiguous guarantee of equal protection to maintain, despite our landmark decision in Brown, an education system where race mattered.
It has now been 20 years since Grutter and no end to race based admission programs is in sight.
Instead the universities here candidly ask us to continue to permit them to make race based admissions decisions indefinitely.
They argue that they are pursuing the educational benefits of diversity and that their admissions programs can end only when those benefits are realized.
Harvard for example identifies the following educational benefits that it is pursuing, training future leaders in the public and private sectors, preparing graduates to adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society, better educating its students through diversity, and producing new knowledge stemming for diverse outlooks.
UNC points to similar goals.
Now, of course, those are commendable goals, but there is no way for courts to know when they have been reached.
How is a court supposed to measure those goals to evaluate whether leaders have been adequately trained, whether the exchange of ideas is robust, or whether new knowledge is being developed, and even if these goals could be measured, there's no way for courts to determine when universities must or must not use racial preferences to achieve them.
So despite the Equal Protection Clause and despite this country's now nearly 70-year effort to remove race from governmental decision-making, the universities here all but say, trust us, when it comes to making race based decisions.
They point to a tradition of giving a degree of deference to a university's academic decisions, which they argue means we should not interfere.
We disagree.
Universities may define their missions as they see fit.
The Constitution defines ours.
Under the Equal Protection Clause, courts may not allow the separation of students on the basis of race without an exceedingly persuasive justification that is measurable and concrete enough to permit meaningful judicial review.
As this court has repeatedly reaffirmed racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.
Here for the reasons we have explained, that connection is missing.
Having failed to articulate clear and measurable goals, universities next argue that they should be allowed to make race based decisions to remedy the underrepresentation of minority groups on their campuses, but none of our cases have ever permitted universities to consider race for that purpose.
To the contrary, we have explained that outright racial balancing is patently unconstitutional.
Here by promising to terminate their use of race only when some rough percentage of various racial groups is admitted, the universities turn that principle on its head.
Their admissions program effectively assure that race will always be relevant, and that the ultimate goal of eliminating race as a criterion will never be achieved.
Finally, we cannot agree that the universities may consider race to remedy the effects of societal discrimination.
That rationale has been foreclosed by our presidents for decades, where otherwise, as Justice O'Connor put it in another case, the dream of a nation of equal citizens would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.
Such a result, she continued, would be contrary to both the letter and spirit of a constitutional provision whose central command is equality.
We do not suggest today that universities must ignore an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise, but universities may not simply establish through applications, essays, or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.
As we have said, what cannot be directly, cannot be done indirectly.
The constitution deals with substance not shadows.
For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.
Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
Nearly 130 years ago, this court issued the decision in Plessy versus Ferguson, where we upheld a Jim Crow Law that required racial segregation on trains.
Plessy has correctly gone down as one of the most reviled decisions that this court has ever issued, but at the time it was decided, Plessy was almost unanimous.
The vote on the court was seven to one.
The one was Justice John Marshall Harlan.
He courageously dissented, writing then only for himself and for history.
?In the view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior dominant ruling class of citizens.
There is not cast here.
Our constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.?
Today we reaffirm that guiding principle.
The judgments of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and of the District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina are reversed.
Justice Thomas has filed a concurring opinion.
Justice Gorsuch has filed a concurring opinion in which Justice Thomas joins.
Justice Kavanaugh has filed a concurring opinion.
Justice Sotomayor has filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join.
Justice Jackson has filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan join.
Justice Jackson did not participate in the Harvard case.
Opinion Announcement - June 29, 2023
意见宣布 - 2023年6月29日
John G. Roberts, Jr.
约翰·G·罗伯茨
I have the opinion for the court this morning in case number 20-1199, Students for Fair Admissions versus the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and case number 21-707, Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina.
今天上午，我代表法院宣布案件编号20-1199，公平招生学生会诉哈佛大学校长及院士，以及案件编号21-707，公平招生学生会诉北卡罗莱纳大学的裁决意见。
These cases involve the admissions systems used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.
这些案件涉及哈佛大学和北卡罗莱纳大学使用的招生系统。
Both schools acknowledge that they use race as one factor in making their admissions decisions, and that race is a decisive factor for some of the students that they admit.
两所学校均承认，在招生决策中使用种族作为一个因素，对于他们录取的一些学生来说，种族是决定性因素。
The question in these cases is whether Harvard and UNC’s programs are permissible under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
这些案件中的问题是，哈佛和北卡大学的项目是否符合第十四修正案中的平等保护条款。
We conclude that they are not.
我们的结论是不符合。
In the wake of the Civil War, Congress proposed and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment providing that no state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.
内战结束后，国会提议并且各州批准了第十四修正案，规定没有哪个州应该否认任何人法律的平等保护。
To its proponents, the Equal Protection Clause represented a foundational principle.
对其支持者来说，平等保护条款代表了一个基本原则。
As Representative John Bingham put it, the absolute equality of all citizens of the United States politically and civilly before their own laws; or to quote Representative Thaddeus Stevens, “any law which operates upon one man should operate equally upon all.”
正如约翰·宾厄姆众议员所说，美国所有公民在其法律面前政治上和民事上的绝对平等；或引用萨迪厄斯·史蒂文斯众议员的话，“任何对一个人起作用的法律都应该同样适用于所有人。”
Or as Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan explained during the amendment’s passage in Congress, the Equal Protection Clause would give to the humblest and poorest of the Black race the same rights and the same protection before the law as it gives to the most powerful or the most wealthy.
或者正如密歇根州的雅各布·霍华德参议员在修正案通过国会期间解释的，平等保护条款将赋予黑人种族中最卑微和最贫穷的人与最有权势或最富有的人在法律面前同样的权利和保护。
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点点点评
杰克逊大法官没有参与哈佛大学案件的审议或决定，很可能是因为在被任命为最高法院大法官之前，她曾担任哈佛大学监事会成员。这种过去的关联可能构成潜在的利益冲突，因此她选择回避，以保持司法的完整性和公正性。
点点点评
The judgments of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and of the District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina are reversed. 第一巡回上诉法院和北卡罗来纳州中区地方法院的判决被推翻。
点点点评
For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. 长期以来，许多大学错误地认为，个人身份的试金石不是其克服的挑战、培养的技能或学到的教训，而是他们的肤色。
点点点评
Finally, we cannot agree that the universities may consider race to remedy the effects of societal discrimination. 最后，我们无法同意大学可以考虑种族来纠正社会歧视的影响。
点点点评
To the contrary, we have explained that outright racial balancing is patently unconstitutional. 相反，我们已经解释过，直接进行种族平衡是明显违宪的。