WASHINGTON — Jonathan F. Mitchell, the architect of the legislation that sharply curtailed abortions in Texas, filed a transient in the Supreme Courtroom the other working day. He has moved on to affirmative action.

The filing has elicited rueful admiration from supporters of race-acutely aware admissions systems in bigger education.

“This transient materials conservative justices with what they may perhaps properly deem an enticing, classy method to dismantling affirmative action,” mentioned Justin Driver, a legislation professor at Yale.

The Texas regulation Mr. Mitchell assisted devise was diabolical, critics said, in handling to insulate a ban on most abortions just after six months of pregnancy from effective judicial evaluate. His new mate-of-the-courtroom brief, by distinction, manufactured a easy place.

He told the justices that they need to have not make your mind up whether or not affirmative action is barred by the Constitution. All they need do, he wrote, is utilize the plain language of a federal civil rights law, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race discrimination by establishments that receive federal revenue.

The Supreme Court, which will listen to arguments this drop in problems to the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, has extensive held that the statute mirrors the Constitution’s equivalent security clause. If an admissions software satisfies the Constitution, the court docket stated, it will have to also be lawful underneath Title VI. That was a slip-up, Mr. Mitchell wrote.

His argument relies on textualism, which is the dominant mode of statutory interpretation at the Supreme Court docket these days, and not only on the political right. “We are all textualists now,” Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, famously reported.

Textualism is concentrated on the words and phrases of the statutes lawmakers have enacted fairly than on their intentions or anticipations. It can lead to benefits that make sure you liberals, as when the courtroom dominated in 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act shielded homosexual and transgender staff. The plain phrases of that provision, which barred discrimination dependent on intercourse, necessary the consequence, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, wrote for the the vast majority.

It did not make a difference, he wrote, that the lawmakers who experienced voted for the statute did not comprehend that they had been striking a blow for homosexual legal rights.

Shortly immediately after the Bostock choice landed, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in The New Yorker that “the court’s feeling also has some prospective land mines for liberals” and that “there is motive to imagine that Bostock’s formalist articulations on discrimination will bolster a conservative choice to dismantle race-mindful admissions guidelines.”

Final week, Professor Gersen reported Mr. Mitchell’s tactic “is likely a convincing method for Justice Gorsuch at a least and likely other justices” and “avoids a lot more complicated constitutional thoughts, earning it a lot easier for the court docket to keep that thinking of race in admissions is unlawful.”

Mr. Mitchell’s short, filed on behalf of The us Very first Lawful Basis, a conservative group led by senior associates of the Trump administration, claimed that “the command of Title VI is obvious, unambiguous and complete.”

The statute says: “No particular person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, colour or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the added benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any method or exercise obtaining federal fiscal support.”

The equivalent security clause of the 14th Amendment, by contrast, suggests that “no state” shall “deny to any human being within just its jurisdiction the equal safety of the rules.”

In the earlier, the Supreme Courtroom has reported the statute tracks the Constitution, relying on statements from lawmakers who had voted for it.

“Examination of the voluminous legislative record of Title VI,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in his managing impression in 1978 in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, “reveals a congressional intent to halt federal funding of entities that violate a prohibition of racial discrimination equivalent to that of the Structure.”

Mr. Mitchell wrote that Justice Powell’s thought of legislative history was equally illegitimate and incomplete, as “there are a great deal of floor statements from legislators who insisted that Title VI would in fact demand colorblindness, in accordance with the unambiguous statutory textual content.”

In 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the courtroom upheld the race-acutely aware admissions method at the College of Michigan’s legislation school on constitutional grounds and extra, in a solitary sentence, that this meant a challenge below Title VI should also are unsuccessful.

Having account of legislative record to identify what a statute usually means has fallen out of favor at the Supreme Court docket, Professor Driver said.

“In present day lawful circles, textualism is ascendant and legislative heritage has become shut to verboten,” he reported. “The brief presents the court docket an possibility not only to wield textualism on behalf of a correct-wing agenda but also to dunk on nontextualist justices from the 1970s. It very well might prove to be an irresistible twofer.”

Mr. Mitchell filed his short, on behalf of neither facet, in the obstacle to the admissions insurance policies of Harvard, a non-public establishment subject matter to Title VI. The College of North Carolina, a general public institution, is matter to both equally Title VI and the equivalent security clause.

Mr. Mitchell’s quick will not make sure you all of his common conservative allies, quite a few of whom would want a sweeping and permanent constitutional ruling. But Mr. Mitchell urged the Supreme Court to steer clear of the constitutional concern, contacting it “a a lot closer question, since it is significantly from obvious that the textual content and first this means of the equal safety clause preclude the use of remedial racial tastes.”

A ruling dependent on the statute, he additional, would go away open, at minimum theoretically, the possibility of further more laws. Harvard could also, Mr. Mitchell wrote, convert down federal money.

Harvard, for its part, instructed the justices that Congress is absolutely free to revise Title VI if it disagrees with the Supreme Court’s conclusion that it mimics the equivalent defense clause. “If Congress desired to amend Title VI to prohibit private universities from contemplating race in admissions, it could do so,” the short mentioned, “but it has not.”