U.S. Supreme Court dismisses pivotal case challenging affirmative action

Jet, Dec 17, 2001

Putting an end to an 11-year-old legal struggle by a White contractor hoping to scuttle affirmative action, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the reverse discrimination case, saying it was flawed.

In the 1990 lawsuit, Adarand v. Mineta, the owner of Adarand Constructors alleged his company suffered reverse discrimination after it lost a construction contract bid for a federal road project in southwest Colorado. The company submitted the lowest bid, but the contract was awarded to a Hispanic-owned firm.

The case (filed as Adarand v. Pena) went before the Supreme Court in 1995. The justices sided with Adarand 5-4, but did not rule the federal program unconstitutional. Instead, it required government programs that use affirmative action be held under the same "strict scrutiny" applied to state and local programs. This meant the government must have evidence of defined acts of discrimination and any race-conscious federal program had to be "narrowly tailored to remedy specific past discrimination."

As a result, the Transportation Department retooled its highway construction program to fit the high court's standards, and the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver upheld the new program last year.

But Adarand continued to pursue the case and appealed to the Supreme Court again, arguing that the program still had racial preferences that failed to meet the strict scrutiny test this time.

In dismissing the case, the high court ruled its review "improvidently granted," meaning that the court should not have taken the case for review because it was flawed.

"The flaw was that the affirmative action program being challenged by Adarand had been changed and no longer incorporated racial preferences and was therefore protected from constitutional challenge," Raneta Lawson Mack, law professor at Creighton University in Omaha, NE, told JET. "Thus, the Supreme Court could not use the Adarand case to determine the legitimacy of race-conscious federal programs because the program in Adarand was no longer race-conscious."