With the Supreme Court’s recent prevalence in the news and its near historically-low approval rating, it’s more important than ever to understand the institution’s role in shaping the law. One way to start is to learn about UT’s historic meetings with the court, which affected the nation’s laws on segregation and race-conscious admission policies. 

Sweatt v. Painter – 1950

During the first half of the 20th century, higher education largely remained segregated to deny equal rights to Black people after the Civil War. The Plessy v. Ferguson case had established the “separate but equal” precedent, requiring segregated institutions to be equal in quality to their counterpart.

In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, a Black man, applied to the UT Law School but was automatically rejected because of his race. He was instead offered enrollment at the newly created Texas State University for Negroes in Houston, now known as Texas Southern University. Sweatt and Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People challenged UT Law’s decision, bringing it to the Supreme Court. 

Rachel Thompson, president of the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society at UT Law, said the justices focused on the differences between the law schools’ numbers of faculty, their libraries and notable alumni when making their judgement. 

“(The Texas State University for Negroes) was only founded for a year, so how can you compare a year’s worth of legacy to decades’ worth of facilities and very qualified faculty?” she said. 

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Sweatt’s favor, citing these differences between the schools that made the separate but equal standard impossible to achieve.

“Sweatt v. Painter was a very important case,” said Lucas Powe Jr., a UT Law professor and leading Supreme Court historian. “The NAACP avoided challenging public schools because it was afraid the court wasn’t willing to go that far.”

In this case, Thurgood Marshall set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education four years later, he said. By declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Brown v. Board of Education would be the final nail in the coffin for the separate but equal legal doctrine, but it only was made possible by Sweatt v. Painter and cases like it. 

“(Sweatt v. Painter) signaled that … (public universities) were going to have to admit African Americans,” Powe Jr. said.

Hopwood v. Texas – 1996

Affirmative action policies, or policies enacted to address past discrimination, were first addressed in higher education by the Supreme Court in 1978 with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In this case, the court ruled that while racial quotas were unconstitutional, the use of race in admission decisions was allowed. 

Liliana Garces, a professor in UT’s college of education, said after this decision, universities could engage in a holistic consideration of individuals’ experiences in what she calls race-conscious admissions and distinguishes from affirmative action.

“Those race-conscious admissions could only be done for the forward-looking role of the educational benefits of diversity within the classroom, for institutions and for society,” Garces said.

In 1991, to implement this goal of diversity, the UT Law School applied a new admissions process that placed white and minority candidates in different pools and set lower requirements for minorities.

In 1992, Cheryl Hopwood, a white woman, applied to the UT Law school and was rejected despite meeting the minimum test score requirement for presumptive admission for white students. She challenged this decision, citing reverse discrimination. 

“The law school stupidly did not admit her,” Powe said. “She challenged our then-affirmative action program, and the (United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) ruled that our program was unconstitutional.”

A writ of certiorari, or a petition for appeal, was issued to the Supreme Court, but it declined to review the case since UT Law had already stopped using the admissions program in question. Thus, in states where the Fifth Circuit has jurisdiction — Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — the use of race in college admissions was prohibited. Former UT President Robert Berdahl said in a 1996 Texan article that this decision had “serious implications” for Texas, including the resegregation of higher education.

However, the Texas Legislature would attempt to mitigate the effects of the court’s decision by passing Texas House Bill 588, which granted students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class automatic admission into state-funded universities like UT. It allowed students from schools with high minority populations to access higher education through merit, without fear of racial discrimination.

According to a 2024 study from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, Texas had one of the largest increases in “intensely segregated” schools, or schools with 90%-100% nonwhite students, from 1988 to 2021.

“Because Texas K-12 (is) often segregated, if you graduate in the top 10% of your class, you can get into a UT System,” Powe said. “Legislation that came as a result of Hopwood brought minorities into UT.”

Fisher v. University of Texas – 2016

Seven years after Hopwood v. Texas, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which ruled that race was a necessary consideration in university admission decisions to acquire a diverse student body. After this, UT altered its race-neutral admission process to only consider race as a factor in applicants who were outside the top 10% of their high school class. 

In 2008, Abigail Fisher, a Caucasian woman who was outside the top 10% of her class, applied to UT and was denied. She sued the University, claiming that the affirmative action policies gave her a disadvantage and were unconstitutional under the equal protection clause. 

“(The Fisher case) went to the Supreme Court twice,” Powe said. “The first time (was) in 2012, and the court sent it back to the court of appeals to clarify what legal standards the court of appeals was using.”

The case came back to the Supreme Court in 2015, and in a 4-3 decision, the court affirmed its decision in Grutter v. Bollinger and sided with UT.  

“(The Supreme Court was) saying that since there are other factors (besides race) in the admission process, that’s why it wasn’t struck down,” Thompson said. “They’re looking at the whole picture.”

However, Fisher and race-conscious policies would be overturned only seven years later in 2023 by Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — Fisher herself being a founding member of SFFA. 

Thompson said this overturnment backtracked progress in diversity and equity in higher education that had been started by Heman Sweatt.

“Heman Sweatt is the first domino (in) a domino effect (in) attempting to dismantle systemic racism that keeps black people out of law schools like this,” she said. “We’re still trying to break down that barrier now because currently, we only have 50 Black law students at UT Law out of 1,000 or 1,200 students that go here.”