Hopwood V. Texas

Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996), was the first successful legal challenge to a university's affirmative action policy in student admissions since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). In Hopwood, four white plaintiffs who had been rejected from The University of Texas School of Law challenged the institution's admissions policy on equal protection grounds and prevailed. After seven years as a precedent in the Fifth Circuit, the Hopwood decision was abrogated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.