In another major reversal, the Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action policies at colleges and universities that use race as a factor in deciding who gets admitted.

In a pair of decisions, the six conservative justices ruled that Harvard, the nation’s oldest private university, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the oldest state university, illegally discriminated on the basis of race and violated the 14th Amendment constitution.

“To eliminate racial discrimination means to eliminate everything,” Chief Justice John G. Robert wrote in his majority decision. “And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies ‘without regard to differences of race, color or nationality’, it is ‘universal in [its] application.'”

The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case, which Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown, a former member of Harvard’s board of trustees, withdrew from.

The Supreme Court overturned 1978 rulings holding universities that had a compelling interest in seeking racial diversity on campus and could view the race of blacks and Latinos as an asset when choosing from well-qualified applicants.

Those precedents continued to be challenged by conservatives, who argued that the Constitution and civil rights law prohibited discrimination based on race, even when the consideration of race was intended to increase diversity and correct past injustices.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions, founded by financier Edward Blum, accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants

other

in favor of blacks and Latinos.

Affirmative action, such as abortion, has been a target of the conservative legal movement for decades, and the court’s liberal precedents on these two important issues were jeopardized when President Trump and Senate Republicans succeeded in appointing three new justices.

However, the impact of the rulings is likely to be limited in California. The University of California is prohibited from using race as an admissions factor

a

ballot measures approved by

the

voters in 1996 and 2020. Eight other states have followed California’s lead in banning race-conscious admissions policies at state universities, including Michigan, Florida and Washington.

But the Harvard ruling extends that ban to private universities, including Stanford and USC.