Hopwood v. Texas

Using race quotas assures that students receive not only a good education, but are exposed to different races and ethnic backgrounds that will prove invaluable in years to come as they enter the work force. Additionally, race quotas help ensure that individuals who have faced discrimination in the past will now be given opportunities previously denied to them. Finally, they can help to correct a racial imbalance in the student body.

However racial quotas are a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and thus they should not be used. Discrimination regardless of the motivation is wrong in any form. "Racial preferences appear to `even the score' . . . only if one embraces the proposition that our society is appropriately viewed as divided into races, making it right than an injustice rendered in the past to a black man should be compensated for by discrimination against a white," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co.