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''SWEATT V. PAINTER'' The school was involved in the 1950 United States Supreme Court case of '' Sweatt V. Painter ''. The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law on the grounds that substantially equivalent facilities (meeting the requirements of '' Plessy V. Ferguson '') were offered by a law school open only to blacks. At the time the plaintiff first applied to The University of Texas, there was no law school in Texas which admitted blacks. The Texas trial court, instead of granting the plaintiff a '' Writ Of Mandamus '', continued the case for six months allowing the state time to create a law school only for blacks. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision saying that the separate school failed to measure up because of quantitative differences in facilities and intangible factors such as its isolation from most of the future s, 850 Student s and a law Library of 65,000 volumes, while the separate school had 5 full-time professors, 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes. The court held that education could be measured only in intangibles. ''HOPWOOD V. TEXAS'' In 1992 , Plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood, a White woman, was denied admission to the School of Law despite being better qualified than many admitted minority candidates. '' Texas Monthly '' editor Paul Burka later described as "the perfect plaintiff to question the fairness of reverse discrimination" because of her academic credentials and the personal hardships she had endured (including a young daughter suffering from a muscular disease). The case of '' Hopwood V. Texas '' was the first successful legal challenge to racial preferences in student admissions since '' Regents Of The University Of California V. Bakke ''. The court decided that the school "may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors other than the law school." However, in 2003 , the Supreme Court ruled in '' Grutter V. Bollinger '', a case involving the University Of Michigan , that the United States Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." This effectively reversed the decision of ''Hopwood v. Texas''. NOTABLE ALUMNI
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