The Court held that a student admissions process that favors "underrepresented minority groups" did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause so long as it took into account other factors evaluated on an individual basis for every applicant.

In her majority opinion, O'Connor wrote that "race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time," adding that the "Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined the Court's opinion, but did not subscribe to the belief that the affirmative measures in question would be unnecessary in 25 years.

In March 2001, U.S. District Court Judge Bernard A. Friedman ruled that the admissions policies were unconstitutional because they "clearly consider" race and are "practically indistinguishable from a quota system."

The Court's majority ruling, authored by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, held that the United States Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

"The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable.

[4] The decision largely upheld the position asserted in Justice Powell's concurrence in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which allowed race to be a consideration in admissions policy, but held that quotas were illegal.

Much of the dissent concerned a disbelief in the validity of the law school's claim that the system was necessary to create a "critical mass" of minority students and provide a diverse educational environment.

In the dissent, Chief Justice Rehnquist used admissions data to argue that unconstitutional discrimination occurred, despite the precedent set in McCleskey v. Kemp that dismisses statistical racial disparities as doctrinally irrelevant in equal protection claims.

[5][6] The case was heard in conjunction with Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), in which the Court struck down the University of Michigan's more rigid, point-based undergraduate admission policy, which was essentially deemed a quota system.

According to Thomas, "the Court is willfully blind to the very real experience in California and elsewhere, which raises the inference that institutions with 'reputations for excellence'...rivaling [Michigan Law's] have satisfied their sense of mission without resorting to prohibited racial discrimination."

Justice Thomas concurred that racial preferences would be unlawful in 25 years, however, he contended that in fact the Court should have found race-based affirmative action programs in higher education unlawful now: I therefore can understand the imposition of a 25-year ban limit only as a holding that the deference the Court pays to the Law School's educational judgments and refusal to change its admissions policies will itself expire.

The measure, called the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or Proposal 2, passed in November 2006 and prohibited the use of race in the Law School admissions processes.

Judges R. Guy Cole Jr. and Martha Craig Daughtrey said that "Proposal 2 reorders the political process in Michigan to place special burdens on minority interests."

On June 29, 2023, the Roberts Court decided in Harvard that the university's affirmative action program constituted unlawful racial discrimination, effectively overturning Grutter.

[11] The Court issued its opinion in the two cases and found that the colleges did not properly follow the Grutter standard in the manner in which race was incorporated into the admissions process.