Affirmative Action Ruling’s Half-Baked Logic: Stephen L. Carter

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.

First, as Roberts writes, colleges and universities should not be allowed to “establish quotas for members of ...