Sotomayor, J., dissenting
III
The Court concludes that Harvard’s and UNC’s policies are unconstitutional because they serve objectives that are insufficiently measurable, employ racial categories that are imprecise and overbroad, rely on racial stereotypes and disadvantage nonminority groups, and do not have an end point. Ante, at 21–34, 39. In reaching this conclusion, the Court claims those supposed issues with respondents’ programs render the programs insufficiently “narrow” under the strict scrutiny framework that the Court’s precedents command. Ante, at 22. In reality, however, “the Court today cuts through the kudzu” and overrules its “higher-education precedents” following Bakke. Ante, at 22 (Gorsuch, J., concurring).
There is no better evidence that the Court is overruling the Court’s precedents than those precedents themselves. “Every one of the arguments made by the majority can be found in the dissenting opinions filed in [the] cases” the majority now overrules. Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 846 (1991) (Marshall, J., dissenting); see, e.g., Grutter, 539 U. S., at 354 (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“Unlike the majority, I seek to define with precision the interest being asserted”); Fisher II, 579 U. S., at 389 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (race-conscious admissions
class,” ibid., misunderstands basic principles of statistics. A number of factors (most notably, the demographic composition of the applicant pool) affect the demographic composition of the entering class. Assume, for example, that Harvard admitted students based solely on standardized test scores. If test scores followed a normal distribution (even with different averages by race) and were relatively constant over time, and if the racial shares of total applicants were also relatively constant over time, one would expect the same “unyielding demographic composition of [the] class.” Ibid. That would be true even though, under that hypothetical scenario, Harvard does not consider race in admissions at all. In other words, the Court’s inference that precise racial preferences must be the cause of relatively constant racial shares of admitted students is specious.
