Opinion of the Court
constitutional provision whose central command is equality.” Id., at 506.
The dissents here do not acknowledge any of this. They fail to cite Hunt. They fail to cite Croson. They fail to mention that the entirety of their analysis of the Equal Protection Clause—the statistics, the cases, the history—has been considered and rejected before. There is a reason the principal dissent must invoke Justice Marshall’s partial dissent in Bakke nearly a dozen times while mentioning Justice Powell’s controlling opinion barely once (Justice Jackson’s opinion ignores Justice Powell altogether). For what one dissent denigrates as “rhetorical flourishes about colorblindness,” post, at 14 (opinion of Sotomayor, J.), are in fact the proud pronouncements of cases like Loving and Yick Wo, like Shelley and Bolling—they are defining statements of law. We understand the dissents want that law to be different. They are entitled to that desire. But they surely cannot claim the mantle of stare decisis while pursuing it.[1]
The dissents are no more faithful to our precedent on race-based admissions. To hear the principal dissent tell it, Grutter blessed such programs indefinitely, until “racial inequality will end.” Post, at 54 (opinion of Sotomayor, J.). But Grutter did no such thing. It emphasized—not once or twice, but at least six separate times—that race-based ad-
- ↑ Perhaps recognizing as much, the principal dissent at one point attempts to press a different remedial rationale altogether, stating that both respondents “have sordid legacies of racial exclusion.” Post, at 21 (opinion of Sotomayor, J.). Such institutions should perhaps be the very last ones to be allowed to make race-based decisions, let alone be accorded deference in doing so. In any event, neither university defends its admissions system as a remedy for past discrimination—their own or anyone else’s. See Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 21–707, at 90 (“[W]e’re not pursuing any sort of remedial justification for our policy.”). Nor has any decision of ours permitted a remedial justification for race-based college admissions. Cf. Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.).
