New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday returns to the question of the role race may place in admissions decisions at public colleges and universities. Here is a look at how the case twice made its way to the court and how changes in the court’s personnel may affect its outcome.

Q. What is the case about?

A. In 2008, the University of Texas at Austin denied admission to Abigail Fisher, a white woman. She said that she would have gotten in had it not been for the university’s practice of taking account of race in admissions decisions. Three-quarters of applicants from Texas are admitted under a program that guarantees admission to roughly the top 10 percent of students in every high school in the state. The remaining Texas students and those from elsewhere are considered under standards that take account of academic achievement and other factors, including race and ethnicity. Ms. Fisher sued over that second part of the admissions plan, saying that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Q. What does Ms. Fisher want?

A. As a legal matter, she wants to do away with racial preferences in admissions decisions at the university. But to have standing to sue, she must also show that she has a personal stake in the question. Given that she has graduated, from Louisiana State University in 2012, that may not be easy.

Ms. Fisher says she is out $100 in application fees; the university responds that the fees would not have been refunded even if she had gotten in. Though the question of Ms. Fisher’s standing is debated at length in the briefs, the Supreme Court has so far shown little interest in the issue. It was not mentioned in the decision the court issued the first time it ruled in the case, in 2013.

Q. What happened last time?

A. The justices first heard arguments in the case in October 2012. The deliberations that followed were unusually fraught, Joan Biskupic reported last year in a book on Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In the end, a fiery draft dissent from Justice Sotomayor helped pave the way for a short, wan compromise decision in June 2013. By a 7-to-1 vote (Justice Elena Kaganhas recused herself because she worked on the case as United States solicitor general), the court returned the case to a federal appeals court, instructing it to take a more careful look at the Texas program.

Last year, the appeals court upheld the program for a second time. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to take another look at the case. Justice Sotomayor may have less to work with this time, as it appears that she used at least parts of her draft in a published dissent from the court’s 2014 decision upholding Michigan’s ban on affirmative action.

Q. Who will hear the case?

A. Without Justice Kagan, there will be only eight justices on the bench. A 4-to-4 tie would automatically uphold the appeals court’s decision.

Q. What has happened since the last major affirmative action case?

A. In 2003, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court upheld the admissions plan at the University of Michigan’s law school. Writing for the majority in the case,Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the school could not use quotas but could consider race as one factor of many in order to construct a diverse student body. Saying that the Constitution ordinarily forbids the government from sorting people by race, she suggested that this exception would last for 25 years.

We are about halfway there. But Justice O’Connor retired in 2006 and was replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has voted with the court’s more conservative justices in decisions involving race.

As usual, the crucial vote belongs to the member of the court at its ideological center, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. His views on when the government can take account of race are not always easy to pin down, but he has never voted to uphold an affirmative action program.

Q. How significant will the court’s ruling be?

A. It is possible that the court will reaffirm the 2003 decision, but that is not the most likely outcome. The court may strike down only Texas’ program, which has an idiosyncratic mix of race-neutral and race-conscious elements.

Or it may say that the Constitution forbids the use of race in admissions decisions at public colleges and universities nationwide. A Supreme Court decision forbidding the use of race in admission at public universities would almost certainly also mean that affirmative action would be banned at most private ones as well, as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.