Polls show Asian-Americans divided fairly evenly on the use of affirmative action. But its opponents appear to be growing more vocal, and they have joined the debate in a bigger way than in the past. In briefs sent to the justices, most of the established Asian-American groups, like the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, support diversity as a goal in college admissions. But a number of others take the side of Ms. Fisher and argue that colleges have increased the numbers of blacks and Hispanics in a way that is wrong and unconstitutional.

“Admission to the nation’s top universities and colleges is a zero-sum proposition,” asserts the brief from the 80-20 National Asian American Educational Foundation, one of the groups opposed to affirmative action. “As aspiring applicants capable of graduating from these institutions outnumber available seats, the utilization of race as a ‘plus factor’ for some inexorably applies race as a ‘minus factor’ against those on the other side of the equation. Particularly hard-hit are Asian-American students, who demonstrate academic excellence at disproportionately high rates but often find the value of their work discounted on account of either their race, or nebulous criteria alluding to it.”

Ms. Fisher asserts that the policy that led to the rejection of her application to the Austin campus hurts not only white applicants but Asian-Americans.

FOCUSING on the Texas university for a national examination of affirmative action is at once suitable and inappropriate. Unlike universities at the center of earlier Supreme Court cases — California, Michigan — Texas has a long history of institutional discrimination.

A Supreme Court case against the university in 1950, Sweatt v. Painter, punctured the “separate but equal” doctrine perpetrated by Southern institutions. Hemon Sweatt, a black man from Houston, had been denied entry to the University of Texas Law School and sent to a substandard, ad hoc law school for African-Americans. Asians and Latinos had also been barred. The court, in a precursor to the landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, declared that unconstitutional.

But the University of Texas is also an unusual institution to accuse of race-based selections because of the idiosyncrasies of the system it adopted in the late 1990s. Shortly after a federal appeals court forbade Texas’s public universities from using race in admissions decisions, the university employed a clever formula: Texans, like most of the country, live in largely segregated communities, so the university accepts the top graduates of every high school. (It’s called the Top 10 Percent Law, but the cutoffs can vary slightly each year.)

In a 2003 case involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court decided that race could be used minimally in college admissions to create a diverse environment. Texas then adjusted its policy to increase diversity further. And it is that policy that Ms. Fisher is challenging. The university takes in the first 75 percent of its admitted class by the top 10 percent rule and then submits the final quarter to a holistic evaluation. That means other issues, including race and ethnicity (and musical and athletic ability and essays), are taken into consideration.