As our colleague Robert Barnes points out, college administrators’ authority “to use race in a limited way to build a diverse student body has barely survived previous challenges. But even a defender of such policies, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, wrote in 2003 that racial preferences were not likely to be needed in 25 years.”

The Supreme Court has undergone almost a complete turnover in the 19 years since O’Connor’s prediction. For the first time in its history, White men don’t make up the majority of the justices, “and includes justices who say affirmative action programs directly shaped their lives.”

On the other hand, the court now has a more dominant conservative majority in place.

Here are a few points to watch as the arguments unfold today:

• Where the justices stand: Justice Clarence Thomas is an outspoken opponent of affirmative action. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is its boldest defender and once called herself the “perfect affirmative action child.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been animated for decades by “a deep skepticism of what he has called the ‘sordid business’ of dividing Americans by race,” Barnes writes. (Here’s what each justice has said about affirmation action in the past.)
• A potential wild card: “If there is a wild card among them, it might be conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the member many consider key to the court’s direction,” Barnes writes.  “Kavanaugh’s record as an advocate and judge suggest an aversion to racial classifications. But he has also displayed an aggressive pursuit of diversity among the clerks he has hired, with repeated outreach to Black student organizations at the nation’s elite law schools.”
• What Harvard and UNC will argue: “Universities say there is a continuing need for affirmative action to build diverse student bodies, which they say strengthen the overall learning environment with distinct perspectives and experiences,” our colleague Ann Marimow writes. “Look for lawyers representing Harvard and UNC to characterize as ‘holistic’ the process the universities use to review applicants. If schools are not permitted to use race, these universities say, enrollment by minorities could decline dramatically.”
• What they’ll say about Brown: Both sides claim the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 decision in which the justices ruled against segregation in public schools. And both of them might have a point. “The Brown opinion is profoundly ambiguous, and they are appealing to different aspects of the opinion, legitimately different aspects,” Michael W. McConnell, a Stanford law professor, told the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. “Is it a case about not assigning on the basis of race or is it a case about making sure that African American schoolchildren get a fair shake in education?”

During our reporting on why women and Black and Hispanic lawyers are underrepresented among lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court — which we shared in a special edition of this newsletter on Sunday — a few people raised an interesting point: While the justices have limited influence over who argues before them, they do have the power to appoint lawyers to make oral arguments. They occasionally use it.