Fisher knew from the start that she wouldn’t personally benefit from the case.
“It was going to take longer than the duration of my going to college. It’s not like they were going to hand me admission, and that’s not really what I wanted.”
So in the meantime, she got on with her life, attending Louisiana State University while the case played out in lower courts.
“My dad would call every now and again and go, ‘Oh hey, we went to the district court today’, or, ‘Oh, we’re going to New Orleans this week to hear your case’,” she says.
But eventually she got a call to say the case was headed to the Supreme Court.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I should brush up on the facts’.”
In person, Fisher is quiet and unassuming, and when she returned to her finance job the day after the hearing, having told no one where she was going, her colleagues were amazed that she had been all over the news.
She, and many observers, were surprised that the case didn’t break in her favour. For years, including at an earlier stage in her case, Justice Anthony Kennedy had been stressing the theme of race neutrality, but this time he cast the decisive vote in favour of affirmative action.
