Before most people had even heard the term “affirmative action,” there was Bakke.
It started with a man named Allan Bakke, a white applicant who was rejected (twice) from the UC Davis Medical School in the 1970s. He wasn’t at the bottom of the applicant pool. In fact, his test scores were higher than many of the students who got in. But UC Davis had a special admissions program that set aside 16 out of 100 seats for minority applicants, part of an effort to correct racial inequality in medicine.
Bakke sued. He said he was being denied a spot because of his race.
And with that, a national debate landed squarely in the Supreme Court’s lap.
What Does Equality Really Mean?
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment promises that no state shall “deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws.” That sounds simple. But as with most things in constitutional law, the hard part is figuring out what it actually means in practice.
Does treating people equally mean ignoring race completely? Or does it mean recognizing that race has shaped access to opportunity—and trying to correct that?
The Court was divided.
Justice Powell’s Middle Path
Justice Lewis Powell wrote the controlling opinion. He rejected the idea that UC Davis could hold a certain number of seats just for minority students. That kind of quota, he said, was too rigid and treated race as the only thing that mattered. In Powell’s view, that was a new kind of racial sorting.
But he didn’t reject affirmative action entirely. He said that race could still be considered as one part of a larger picture. A university, for example, could take a student’s race into account alongside grades, test scores, life experience, and leadership. That kind of individualized consideration was okay, Powell said, because it aimed at a broader educational goal: creating a diverse student body where everyone learned more because of the different perspectives in the room.
In short, quotas were out. Diversity was in—as long as race wasn’t the deciding factor.
Not All the Justices Agreed
Four other justices (Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun) agreed that Bakke should be admitted. But they strongly disagreed with Powell’s reasoning.
To them, the whole point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect Black Americans after slavery and to dismantle the structures of racial exclusion. Affirmative action was a continuation of that promise. It wasn’t about treating people unfairly. It was about correcting a system that had never been neutral in the first place.
They argued that using race to harm people, like in segregation laws, should absolutely be treated with suspicion. But using race to help dismantle injustice? That should be judged differently. It wasn’t about preference. It was about repair.
A Different Way to Evaluate Fairness
These four justices proposed a flexible legal test that asked: Is the government trying to fix a real problem? And is the policy closely tied to that goal?
They pointed out that affirmative action programs, like the one at UC Davis, weren’t handing out unearned spots. All students had to meet minimum academic standards. No one was getting a free pass. The program just recognized that long-standing barriers like discrimination in schools, neighborhoods, and hiring, had kept certain groups out of fields like medicine. Giving those groups a leg up wasn’t favoritism. It was fairness.
They also questioned the fear that using race to help these students would automatically stigmatize them. In their view, it wasn’t the use of race that created stigma. It was inequality itself.
The Legacy of Bakke
In the end, the Court gave a kind of split answer. Bakke was admitted. The quota system at UC Davis was struck down. But affirmative action itself wasn’t banned.
Instead, the Court carved out a narrow path: schools could consider race in admissions, but only in careful, limited ways. Race could be one factor, but never the only one.
This became the framework that guided universities for the next few decades. They designed “holistic” admissions processes, took race into account without using quotas, and defended those policies in court by pointing to the educational value of diversity.
But the bigger debate—about what fairness really means, and how we should respond to the long shadow of racism—never went away. It kept showing up, again and again, in new cases, with new plaintiffs and new constitutional questions.
Bakke didn’t end the conversation. It opened it.
Doctrinal sum-up:
Standard of Review: Strict scrutiny
Compelling Government Interest (Accepted): Diversity in higher education
Not Accepted: Remedying general societal discrimination (not enough by itself)