Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling Follows Half-Baked Logic

Chief Justice John Roberts gets few things right in his majority opinion and lots of things wrong.

June 29, 2023 at 5:17 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

The US Supreme Court.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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So it’s over. Seriously. It’s hard to find a simple workaround to rescue affirmative action in college admission after today’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that the programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the 14th Amendment. Oh, given time, we’ll come up with something. But Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion paints so broadly that those of us who hope to find a path around it will have to be exceedingly clever.

Let’s start with what the majority got right.