The task of filling these 145 places was delegated to an admission committee consisting of five faculty members and two students… By means of a formula combining the law school admissions test score and the applicant’s junior and senior year college grade averages, a law school predicted first year average is established.

With very few exceptions, and almost always with no further consideration, the admissions committee in 1971 admitted applicants whose predicted first year average was 77 or above. The files of applicants whose predicted first year average was below 74.5 and who were not black Americans, Chicano Americans, native American Indians or Philippine Americans [called “minority students”] were examined by the chairman of the admission committee alone. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these applications were rejected by the chairman without further recourse…That left a residual category of applications, which was divided into two groups: those showing predicted first-year averages between 76.99 and 74.5 for applicants who were not …[“minority students”] – the group in which DeFunis was included, with a score of 76.23; and those showing that the applicant was a …[“minority student”] with a predicted first year average below 76.99 as well as below 74.5… The second group, although forming part of the same residual category, was treated distinctly and separately.

…Files in this separately treated group of …[“minority students”] were compared with each other and not with the rest of the applications passed upon by the committee or by its chairman individually.

By this method, the trial court found, 44 … [“minority students”] were offered admission to the law school, the vast majority of whom had lower predicted first-year averages than that of DeFunis, and some of whom, had they been white, would have had their applications summarily denied, presumably by exercise of the function delegated to the chairman of the admissions committee…

The justification for this policy, as the dean stated it, was that the minority racial and ethnic groups whom the Law School now sought to provide with a “reasonable representation” were those which has been “historically suppressed and excluded from participation in what might be thought of, I suppose, the main stream of our society, and certainly in participation in the legal arena.” The stated assumption underlying the policy was that these groups had been and were now culturally and economically disadvantaged, and that the usual method of evaluating applicants were consequently less than usually accurate with respect to them. But there is no pretense in this record that the assumption of cultural and economic disadvantage as applied to any particular individual applicants rested on anything but his race.