On October 15, the U.S. District Court in Boston will begin hearing a lawsuit alleging that Harvard University’s admissions policies unconstitutionally discriminate against Asian Americans. Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a coalition of several Asian-American groups headed by the conservative legal scholar and activist Edward Blum, contends that Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, by favoring black and Latino students, unfairly penalize better-qualified Asian Americans. The case is likely destined for the Supreme Court.

As Stuart Taylor Jr. explains in our pages this week, the group’s argument is virtually unassailable. A 2012 internal document analyzing admissions data over 10 years by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR)—which SFFA obtained after a legal challenge—found that if students were admitted based on academic scores alone, on average less than 1 percent of Harvard’s entering freshman class would have been African American,and only 2.42 percent would have been Latino. Most of the rest would have been white (38.37 percent) and Asian(43.04 percent).