Law Commons^™

Hopwood V. Texas: The Beginning Of The End For Racial Preference Programs In Higher Education, Jeremy Moeser

Mercer Law Review

In Hopwood v. Texas, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the University of Texas ("UT") School of Law's admissions program, which gave preference to African-Americans and Mexican-Americans, violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. For the 1992 school year, the University of Texas School of Law processed applications by using an applicant's Texas Index ("TI") number, a figure comprised of the applicant's undergraduate grade point average and Law School Admissions Test ("LSAT") score. Based on the TI, the law school distributed applications into three categories of review: presumptive admit, presumptive deny, and discretionary zone. For …