Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 decision that gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. That case was sponsored by Mr. Blum.

If Judge Burroughs found Harvard’s policies weak in any area, it may have been on the question of whether implicit bias was a factor in the admissions process. She said it was conceivable that the unintentional biases of admissions officers, and of guidance counselors and teachers who write student recommendations, could affect the process. But the effects were very slight, she added, and “while regrettable, cannot be completely eliminated in a process that must rely on judgments about individuals.”

“We used to be concerned when you had explicit bias, which is demonstrated by Brown v. Board,” Professor Tobias said of the 1954 Supreme Court case outlawing racially segregated schools. “But the idea of implicit bias is that they’re still lingering and people may not even know it. Just by living in this society, they have acquired biases, specially against minorities.”

Judge Burroughs did not buy the plaintiffs’ statistical analysis arguing that Harvard’s more subjective admissions measures were prone to stereotyping, but suggested that Harvard could do a better job of guarding against implicit bias. “It may offer them an opening to make that argument on appeal,” Professor Tobias said.

He said it was more likely, however, that the plaintiffs would focus on overturning precedent going back to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which in 1978 became the first case to uphold race-conscious admissions but outlawed racial quotas.

Judge Burroughs found that there was no smoking gun of discrimination. “The statistics themselves are alone not enough,” she said. “In other words, although the statistics perhaps tell ‘what,’ they do not tell ‘why,’ and here the ‘why’ is critically important.”

She said the testimony from admissions officers that there was no discrimination against Asian-American applicants was “consistent, unambiguous and convincing.” It was likely, she said, that the plaintiffs’ statistical analysis was flawed and the Asian-American penalty was overstated.