WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court docket hears arguments on Monday on the destiny of affirmative motion in larger training, the justices might be working within the looming shadow of a towering authorized landmark: Brown v. Board of Training, the unanimous 1954 determination that stated the Structure prohibits racial segregation in public faculties.

Either side declare the mantle of Brown, which is broadly considered the courtroom’s most interesting second. The challengers say the choice requires admissions insurance policies to be colorblind, dooming race-conscious packages at Harvard and the College of North Carolina.

The colleges reply that Brown meant to put off a racial caste system that subjugated Black college students, and that the choice certainly allowed efforts to assemble various pupil our bodies to make sure instructional range.

Brown’s singular standing solely deepened the controversy over its that means, Justin Driver, a regulation professor at Yale, stated.

“Brown is the Mona Lisa of American constitutional regulation,” he stated. “It’s not solely the courtroom’s most scrutinized and most well-known opinion, however its that means additionally shifts when considered from completely different angles.”

Either side could have a degree, Michael W. McConnell, a regulation professor at Stanford, stated.

“The Brown opinion is profoundly ambiguous, and they’re interesting to completely different features of the opinion, legitimately completely different features,” he stated. “Is it a case about not assigning on the idea of race or is it a case about ensuring that African American schoolchildren get a good shake in training?”

The group difficult the 2 admissions packages, College students for Truthful Admissions, or S.F.F.A., put Brown entrance and middle in its briefs.

“Any dialogue of racial classifications in training should begin with Brown,” its legal professionals wrote in Might.

And listed here are the opening strains from a reply transient filed in August: “U.N.C.’s argument shouldn’t be with S.F.F.A.; it’s with Brown. That landmark determination fulfilled the 14th Modification’s promise by requiring that ‘training … be made accessible to all on equal phrases.’”

Legal professionals for U.N.C. stated that was a profound misreading of the choice. “Brown held that the arbitrary separation of scholars primarily based on race violates equal safety,” they wrote. “Establishments like U.N.C. that search to deliver college students of various backgrounds collectively are the rightful heirs to Brown’s legacy.”

In a quick for pupil and alumni teams at Harvard, legal professionals for the NAACP Authorized Protection and Instructional Fund, the civil rights group that litigated Brown, wrote that the courtroom could be enjoying with hearth had been it to undertake the challengers’ understanding of the choice.

“The Brown determination was one of many most interesting moments on this courtroom’s historical past,” they wrote. “But, this courtroom dangers jeopardizing that legacy — and damaging its personal legitimacy — ought to S.F.F.A. prevail in misconstruing one in all its canonical selections to dismantle a long time of precedent that affirmed the legality of race-conscious admissions.”

The courtroom in Brown held that segregated public faculties denied Black college students the equal safety of the legal guidelines assured by the 14th Modification. “Separate instructional services are inherently unequal,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

Precisely what else the ruling and its reasoning required has lengthy been the topic of debate. In 2007, as an example, the Supreme Court docket debated the that means of Brown in a choice that restricted the flexibility of public faculties to take account of race to attain integration, Mother and father Concerned in Neighborhood Colleges v. Seattle College District No. 1.

Solely three justices serving then are nonetheless on the courtroom: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. Together with Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, all of them signed a plurality opinion adopting a colorblind understanding of Brown.

The events “debate which facet is extra devoted to the heritage of Brown,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in 2007 for the plurality, “however the place of the plaintiffs in Brown was spelled out of their transient and couldn’t have been clearer.”

The chief justice quoted from the transcript of the 1952 argument within the case.

“We now have one elementary rivalry, which we are going to search to develop in the midst of this argument,” Robert L. Carter, a lawyer with the authorized protection fund, stated then, “and that rivalry is that no state has any authority beneath the equal safety clause of the 14th Modification to make use of race as a think about affording instructional alternatives amongst its residents.”

Chief Justice Roberts added: “There isn’t any ambiguity in that assertion. And it was that place that prevailed on this courtroom.”

S.F.F.A., the group difficult admissions insurance policies, repeatedly cited a truncated model of Mr. Carter’s assertion in its briefs, indicating that it represented the holding of the 2007 determination. “The courtroom vindicated the promise of the 14th Modification in Brown v. Board of Training,” one S.F.F.A. transient stated, by “rejecting ‘any authority … to make use of race as a think about affording instructional alternatives.’”

In an interview with The New York Instances on the day the 2007 determination was issued, the lawyer who had made that assertion, by then a 90-year-old senior federal choose in Manhattan, stated the chief justice had gotten issues backward.

“All that race was used for at that time limit was to disclaim equal alternative to Black individuals,” Choose Carter, who died in 2012, stated of the Nineteen Fifties. “It’s to face that argument on its head to make use of race the best way they use it now.”

Jack Greenberg, one other lawyer who had labored on the Brown case, stated on the identical day that the chief justice’s interpretation was “preposterous.”

“The plaintiffs in Brown had been involved with the marginalization and subjugation of Black individuals,” Professor Greenberg stated. “They stated you’ll be able to’t think about race, however that’s how race was getting used.” Mr. Greenberg died in 2016.

That understanding of Brown, articulated by the civil rights legal professionals who gained the case, could also be overtaken by a extra restricted one when the Supreme Court docket decides the brand new circumstances, in all probability in late June. The courtroom’s six-member conservative majority now consists of three justices appointed by President Donald J. Trump.

The courtroom has issued three main circumstances on the usage of race in admissions selections in larger training: College of California v. Bakke, in 1978; Grutter v. Bollinger, in 2003; and Fisher v. College of Texas, in 2016. All had been carefully divided and all despatched the essential message that numerical racial quotas had been forbidden however {that a} holistic strategy, utilizing race as one issue amongst many within the admissions course of, was permissible.

The selections allowed solely a single justification for race-conscious admissions plans: creating instructional range in order that college students of various backgrounds could study from each other.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been among the many legal professionals who argued the Brown case, issued a partial dissent within the Bakke case, saying that Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s controlling opinion was too cramped in rejecting the usage of race to treatment previous discrimination.

“It should be remembered that, throughout many of the previous 200 years, the Structure as interpreted by this courtroom didn’t prohibit essentially the most ingenious and pervasive types of discrimination in opposition to the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to treatment the results of that legacy of discrimination, I can not consider that this identical Structure stands as a barrier.”

Within the Grutter determination, the bulk endorsed Justice Powell’s strategy. The challengers within the new circumstances ask the Supreme Court docket to overrule Grutter.

“As a result of Brown is our regulation,” S.F.F.A’s legal professionals wrote, “Grutter can’t be.”

In its Supreme Court docket transient, legal professionals for Harvard wrote that the three affirmative motion circumstances rested on Brown. “Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher uphold Brown in each approach,” they wrote. “Like Brown, these selections relied on the overriding significance of training.”

The Biden administration, in a quick supporting the schools, urged the justices to reject what it stated was a revisionist view of Brown.

“Nothing in Brown’s condemnation of legal guidelines segregating the races to perpetuate a caste system calls into query admissions insurance policies adopted to advertise higher integration and variety,” the transient stated. “And petitioner’s persistent makes an attempt to equate this case with Brown trivialize the grievous authorized and ethical wrongs of segregation.”

However the challengers wrote that Brown should be learn broadly to forbid consideration of race.

“Harvard and america trivialize Brown by attempting to restrict that foundational precedent to its information,” legal professionals for S.F.F.A. wrote, including: “Certainly Harvard doesn’t suppose that Brown would have been completely different if Southern faculties had used a holistic coverage that covertly decreased the variety of Black college students.”

At backside, stated Kenji Yoshino, a regulation professor at New York College, the controversy over the that means of Brown activates how and why faculty officers take account of race.

“The segregationists believed in race-conscious insurance policies that entrenched the subordination of Black Individuals,” he stated. “U.N.C.’s race-conscious insurance policies, in stark distinction, search to ameliorate that dehumanizing subordination. This has at all times been the crux of the affirmative motion debate. Does the 14th Modification’s equal safety clause forbid racial classification itself or solely racial classification that entrenches historic subordination?”