In Monday’s majority opinion in Grutter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recalled Powell’s assertion that diversity brings major benefits to academic settings.

“These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints,” O’Connor wrote.

O’Connor, who was widely considered the swing vote on Monday’s cases, also cited the example of the U.S. military. A friend-of-the-court brief filed by high-ranking members of the armed forces said their ranks had reaped advantages from diversity after putting race-conscious policies in place.

But O’Connor’s ruling stressed the importance of the Law School’s “individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment.”

By contrast, in Gratz the Court held that Michigan’s undergraduate point-based policy rewarded race to the exclusion of any nuanced consideration.

“Clearly, [the undergraduate] system does not offer applicants the individualized selection process described in Harvard’s example,” wrote Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist for the majority.

The Reactions

Though they hailed the day as an overall success, some professors and officials at Harvard said the Gratz ruling placed unnecessary restrictions on affirmative action programs—though Summers said it would have no effect on Harvard’s non-point-based system.

“The point system was a reasonable application of Bakke,” said Gary Orfield, founding co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard.

Though Tribe said he thought the point system could have been upheld, such a ruling “was an almost inconceivable outcome given the current composition of the Court.”

But the Court’s ruling against Michigan’s undergraduate policy should not be a major cause for concern, Tribe and Orfield said.

The result of the undergraduate ruling was “a relatively minor loss which in the end may make the court’s compromise more broadly acceptable throughout society,” Tribe said.

“I really don’t feel a lot of regret about the point system going,” Orfield said, adding that individualized race-conscious policies are “the fairest system.”

Summers said that Harvard’s interest in the case had not centered on defending such a point-based system.

“It’s probably the case that the appropriate weight to give to race will vary from situation to situation,” he said. “The important thing is the principle and that’s what we focused our brief on.”