Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decided (1978)

CTL-E-5433 · Event · other · 1978

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

On June 28, 1978, the United States Supreme Court decided Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, the case the intake timeline files as 'The Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action.' Allan Bakke, a white applicant twice rejected by the medical school at the University of California, Davis, had challenged the school's admissions program, which reserved sixteen of one hundred seats for minority students. A fractured Court produced no single majority opinion: four justices would have upheld the program, four would have ended all racial consideration under Title VI, and Justice Lewis Powell's lone opinion controlled the outcome — the Davis set-aside was unconstitutional and Bakke was admitted, but race could remain one factor among many in a holistic admissions process aimed at a diverse student body. Powell's diversity rationale governed university affirmative action for forty-five years, through Grutter in 2003, until the Court ended the practice in the Harvard and North Carolina cases of 2023. The graph's nearest prior record — Chicago's MWBE set-aside program (CTL-E-1354) — is affirmative action's municipal cousin, labeled NEAR in the audit; this record is the decision itself.

The record

• Also known as: The Bakke Decision, Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action, Bakke v. Regents

Notes

Statistics: Decided June 28, 1978 (Wikipedia). The intake paste's stop #35 (1978) is VERIFIED. Holding in one line: quotas struck down; race as one admissions factor upheld (Powell, J.). The doctrine stood until 2023 — stated here as the decision's downstream history, not as part of the 1978 holding. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: Bakke is the timeline's most lawyerly stop, and the record treats it with a lawyer's care: no majority, one controlling opinion, forty-five years of consequence. A citation graph earns its name on records like this — the ones where the summary everyone repeats ('the Court upheld affirmative action' / 'the Court banned it') is wrong in both directions. · Photo slot: HELD — no rights-cleared image was verified for this record in the merge run's bounded Commons sweep (2026-10-15); slot stays HELD until a cleared image is obtained (commons upload, public-domain government portrait, or CTL original), per CTL-PHOTO-001.

Sources

• Wikipedia, 'Regents of the University of California v. Bakke' — supports: the June 28, 1978 decision, citation 438 U.S. 265, the 16-of-100 set-aside, and Powell's controlling opinion (the audit's anchor)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Regents of the University of California v. Bakke' — supports: the fractured 4–1–4 alignment and the diversity rationale's later course through Grutter (2003)
• Oyez Project, 'Regents of the University of California v. Bakke' — supports: the case's facts, holding, and Bakke's admission

Record CTL-E-5433 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources · CTL research: BCI-001, RELP-001.
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