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Authors

Jeremy Moeser

Publication Date

3-1997

Document Type

Casenote

Abstract

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 resident whites and nonpreferred minorities, the law school usually considered 199 to be the minimum presumptive admit score and 192 to be the maximum presumptive deny score. As part of the school's policy to admit more minorities, however, the law school reduced these two scores for African-American and Mexican-Americans to 189 and 179 respectively. The admissions board hoped to admit a class that reflected the percentage of African-Americans (five percent) and Mexican-Americans (ten percent) who graduated from Texas colleges. Of the Texas resident applicants, the law school's preference admitted one-hundred percent of the African-Americans, ninety percent of the Mexican- Americans, but only six percent of the whites.

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