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| Ms. Fisher outside the United States Supreme Court |
In the Fisher case, a young white woman was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Fisher subsequently filed a lawsuit against the University alleging that she was a victim of racial discrimination because minority students with less impressive credentials than hers had been admitted when she had not.
In the Texas lower courts, the University prevailed. However Ms. Fisher continued on and argued to the United States Supreme Court that the University's use of race in undergraduate admissions decisions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Respected Supreme Court blog SCOTUSblog notes that many legal scholars were pessimistic about the possibility of affirmative action surviving the Supreme Court's majority conservative bench. In fact, many though the Court would ban university affirmative action measures altogether.
Instead, the Court took a more moderate approach. For the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy did not strike down the use of affirmative action. Instead he sent the case back to the lower courts with one instruction: public universities may consider race in admissions decisions only if the university can show their student bodies will not be sufficiently diverse any other way.
How this will affect University of California admissions? Not a whole lot. Back in 1997 California voters passed Proposition 209 which banned California public universities from using "racial preferences" in admissions decisions. Since 1998, the University of California has instead used a wide variety of non-racial factors in its admissions decisions to build a diverse student body.
