se of race in the admissions process was forbidden by the Constitution.(6) By so doing, the Fifth Circuit has made the struggle for equality harder for blacksas well as a federal appellate court’s decision in Hopwood v. Texas purporting to overrule the Supreme Court’s landmark Bakke decision of 1978 with regard to the validity of diversity-based affirmative action in university admissions. In Hopwood, the Fifth Circuit decided that the admissions process at the University of Texas School of Law violated the United States Constitution because it maintained a process by which black and Mexican-American students were evaluated under a different system in order to obtain proportionate represeThe ruling stated: We hold that the University of Texas School of Law may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors other than the law school (Hopwood Case).The Hopwood Decision in Texas as an Attack on Latino Access to Selective Higher Education ProgramsJorge Chapa et al.*Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public AffairsThe University of Texas at Austin Click here to see the tables associated with this paper.AbstractThis paper begins with a review of the Hopwood decision which has prohibited Texas colleges and universities from making any consideration of race or Latino origin in admissions or financial aid decisions. One of the immediate effects of the Hopwood decision was to decrease the number of Latino who applied and were admitted to many of the most selective publicly-funded higher education programs in the state. The amount of financial aid available to Latino students was also drastically decreased because of Hopwood. The next section of the paper argues that t...
