Hi, I'm John Don Van, host and moderator of Intelligent Square US Debates.

Well it was a long anticipated decision on affirmative action from the Supreme Court, and

now the justices have ruled.

And as a result, a challenge made to the race conscious admissions program used by the University

of Texas Austin has failed.

The challenge has failed.

The justices deciding for to three that the school can consider race as one factor in

admissions and that will be constitutional.

And at this pivot point, we are going to re-release parts of our December 2015 debate

on affirmative action.

We held this one in partnership with the National Constitution Center, and the motion was

the Equal Protection Clause prohibits racial preference in state university admissions.

Well, we didn't have men and women in black robes on our stage, but we did have four

brilliant constitutional scholars debating whether race conscious considerations are constitutionally

valid in school admissions at the state level, which meant our debate revisited actual language

of the Constitution and the history of the Equal Protection Clause and the Supreme Court's

previous rulings in such cases.

Roger Klaig, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity and Stuart Taylor

Jr., non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in favor of the motion,

arguing against them Deborah Archer, director of the racial justice project and professor at New

York Law School, and Irwin Chamorinsky, dean of the University of California's Irvine School of Law.

We begin the debate with Stuart Taylor, who has us take a closer look at the Supreme Court's

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