By the time Harvard reached the Court, the patient was already on life support. Bakke had made sure of that. Decades of slow, methodical rulings had drained affirmative action of its lifeblood, replacing it with a fragile fiction called “diversity.”

The justices didn’t gather for a fight this time. There was no moral urgency, no pretense of surgical precision. This was the quiet, inevitable work of closing a case file on a body they had already prepared for burial.

The arguments were ceremonial—a public wake for a doctrine that had been dying in plain sight. The defense spoke of history, of inequality, of the long shadow cast by slavery and segregation. But those words floated in the chamber like incense—pleasant, but powerless. The decision had already been written.

When the verdict came, it was dressed in the language of principle, but it read like an execution order. They declared the experiment over, the remedy unnecessary, the wound healed—though outside the marble walls, the wound still festered.

The gavel fell, and the sound was not a crack but a thud—like dirt hitting a coffin lid.

And so it ended, not with outrage, not with fire, but with the cold finality of men and women in robes signing away the last vestiges of a promise they never intended to keep.