Essay Example on Affirmative action laws policies and Guidelines

Thus one might see affirmative action as a necessary step to implement the principles of educational integration articulated by the US Supreme Court in the landmark 1954 decision of Brown v Board of Education 1953 which had ruled that barring African Americans from white secondary schools was unconstitutional racial discrimination However others say that affirmative action policies result in reverse racism whereby African American students receive an unfair advantage over white students Affirmative Action Grutter v Bollinger 2003 was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School although it restricted the types of affirmative action policies that the universities could implement Oyez 

The case was brought by Barbara Grutter who applied for admission to the University of Michigan Law School She claimed that although she had qualified grades as an undergraduate and a high LSAT score she was nevertheless denied admission due to racial factors The University of Michigan admitted that it did factor race into its admissions decisions because it wanted to increase campus diversity In order to achieve the necessary diversity the University of Michigan Admissions Department had created a policy to make sure that a critical mass of its student body was non white The federal district court however ruled that the University was not allowed to use race at all in its admissions decisions and that the critical mass standard was essentially a racial quota which the court determined was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment