Edward Blum's Post-SFFA Lawsuit Wave on Corporate DEI

Edward Blum spent nearly a decade building Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The Supreme Court decided it 6-3 on June 29, 2023, ending race-conscious admissions at every American college that accepts federal funds. Within weeks Blum had a new vehicle, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, and a new target. AAER's first major case, filed August 2, 2023, sued the Fearless Fund over a $20,000 grant program for Black women business owners. The Eleventh Circuit ruled on June 3, 2024 that the program likely violated 42 U.S.C. Section 1981. Fearless settled and shut the program down. The lawsuits that followed have rewritten eligibility rules for grants, fellowships, and pipeline programs across corporate America.

Key Findings

• The Supreme Court decided SFFA v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 on June 29, 2023, 6-3, ending race-conscious college admissions.
• Edward Blum founded the American Alliance for Equal Rights shortly after, filing the Fearless Fund lawsuit on August 2, 2023.
• The Eleventh Circuit ruled on June 3, 2024 that the Fearless Strivers Grant Contest likely violated 42 U.S.C. Section 1981, which guarantees all persons the same right to make and enforce contracts.
• Fearless Fund settled in September 2024 and permanently closed the grant program.
• AAER sued Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster on August 22, 2023 over diversity fellowships restricted to students of color, LGBTQ+ students, or students with disabilities.
• Both firms expanded eligibility; AAER dropped the suits. Winston and Strawn restructured its 1L fellowship under similar pressure.
• Pfizer's Breakthrough Fellowship was challenged not by AAER but by Do No Harm. Pfizer opened eligibility to all races in 2023; the parties settled in January 2025.

Who is Edward Blum and what is AAER?

Blum is the legal strategist behind the most consequential civil-rights litigation of the last decade. Through the Project on Fair Representation, founded in 2005, he recruited plaintiffs and assembled cases including Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016), Shelby County v. Holder (2013, which gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act), and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

SFFA was filed in November 2014. It took nine years. The Supreme Court's June 29, 2023 ruling held that Harvard's and UNC's admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."

The American Alliance for Equal Rights is the operational arm Blum spun up after SFFA to apply the same legal theory to private-sector race-conscious programs. AAER is a 501(c)(3) that recruits plaintiffs harmed by exclusion from race-restricted opportunities, then sues under either Section 1981 (for private contracts) or Title VI (for federally funded programs). The model is the same one that worked for Harvard: find a real plaintiff, pick a defendant with a clear program that explicitly excludes by race, force the court to apply a colorblind reading of the controlling statute.

What did SFFA v. Harvard actually change?

SFFA's holding was about admissions. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Harvard's race-conscious admissions program "lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points." Strict scrutiny applied; Harvard's program failed it.

The decision did not directly bind private employers, private grantmakers, or law firms. Title VII (employment discrimination) was untouched. Section 1981 was untouched. The Equal Protection Clause governs state action and federally funded programs, not the private market.

But the reasoning radiated. If race-conscious admissions decisions cannot survive strict scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment, race-restricted grant programs in the private sector face a related question under Section 1981, the post-Civil War statute that gives "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States" the same right "to make and enforce contracts" as white citizens. Section 1981 applies to private parties. It always has. SFFA gave the doctrinal shift that Blum needed to make Section 1981 cases politically and legally viable.

That is the architecture: a Supreme Court ruling on public-sector race-conscious admissions, used as the cultural and legal uses to challenge private-sector race-restricted programs through a different statute. Different doctrine, related target.

The Fearless Fund case explained

Fearless Fund is an Atlanta-based venture capital firm founded by Arian Simone and Ayana Parsons. Its affiliated 501(c)(3), the Fearless Foundation, ran the Strivers Grant Contest: a $20,000 award open exclusively to businesses owned by Black women. The program's stated goal was to address the gap in venture capital flowing to Black female founders, who in 2022 received less than 1% of US VC funding.

AAER sued on August 2, 2023 in the Northern District of Georgia. The plaintiffs were three women business owners who were not Black and who alleged they would have applied for the grant but were excluded by the race requirement. AAER sought a preliminary injunction halting the contest.

The district court denied the injunction. AAER appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. On June 3, 2024, a divided panel reversed. The court held the grant contest was likely a "contract" within Section 1981's meaning, that it did not qualify for any remedial-program exception, and that it was unlikely to be protected as expressive conduct under the First Amendment. Judge Robin Rosenbaum dissented sharply, arguing the majority misread both Section 1981 and First Amendment doctrine.

The Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Its ruling is precedential in those three states. Outside them, the question remains unresolved at the appellate level.

Fearless Fund settled with AAER in September 2024. As part of the settlement, the Fearless Foundation permanently closed the Strivers Grant Contest. The fund's broader venture investments continue. The grant program does not.

What other lawsuits has AAER filed?

The day Fearless settled, AAER's docket already had several other live cases. The strategic pattern: pick defendants with publicly documented race-restricted programs, file in jurisdictions favorable to Section 1981 claims, and force a choice between litigation costs and program restructuring.

Law firm diversity fellowships. On August 22, 2023, AAER sued Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster over 1L and 2L fellowship programs that limited eligibility to "students of color," LGBTQ+ students, or students with disabilities. The fellowships were lucrative: paid summer associate positions plus stipends often exceeding $25,000. Within weeks both firms revised eligibility to remove the race restrictions. AAER dropped both suits. Winston and Strawn, not initially sued, restructured its 1L fellowship under the same logic. Adams and Reese announced it would not run its 1L Minority Fellowship in 2024 at all.

Pfizer Breakthrough Fellowship. This one is often misattributed to AAER. The plaintiff was Do No Harm, a medical-professional advocacy group, which sued Pfizer in September 2022 (pre-SFFA). The challenged program excluded Asian American and white applicants. Pfizer altered eligibility in 2023, before SFFA, opening the program to applicants of any race. The case settled formally on January 31, 2025 after a years-long standing fight that reached the Second Circuit. The substantive outcome (race-restricted eligibility removed) matched the AAER playbook even though Blum's organization was not the litigant.

Hello Alice. Also frequently grouped with AAER cases but actually filed by America First Legal in November 2023. The challenge: a $25,000 grant program for Black-owned small commercial vehicle businesses. The Northern District of Ohio dismissed for lack of standing. America First Legal appealed to the Sixth Circuit. The case was still being litigated as of 2025.

Comcast's RISE program has appeared in various critical-press treatments of the post-SFFA litigation wave. Comcast restructured RISE's eligibility in 2024 to open it to all small business owners while retaining a "focus on diversity, inclusion and community investment" in marketing language. No major federal lawsuit reached judgment.

How are corporations responding preemptively?

The pattern across major law firms in 2024 was preemptive restructuring. After the Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster suits resolved, peer firms reviewed their own fellowship programs and quietly removed explicit race-based eligibility criteria. The new framing relies on socioeconomic factors, first-generation status, "demonstrated commitment to diversity," or geographic markers that correlate with but do not directly invoke race.

Some firms eliminated stand-alone diversity fellowships entirely and folded the spending into broader scholarship pools. Others kept the programs but rewrote eligibility to admit any applicant who could articulate a contribution to a diverse legal profession. The latter approach survives Section 1981 scrutiny because no protected class is excluded; the former eliminates the legal exposure entirely.

Corporate grant programs have followed a similar arc. Programs explicitly restricted to founders or owners of specific races have either been opened up, closed down, or restructured to use criteria that correlate with the original target population without using race as an eligibility line. The legal advice driving these changes is consistent: an explicit race restriction in a contract or grant is a Section 1981 target after Fearless Fund, regardless of motive.

What this tells you about the legal architecture

Three things matter about the post-SFFA litigation wave that the surface coverage tends to miss.

First, the controlling statute in most of these cases is not the Fourteenth Amendment. It is Section 1981, an 1866 Reconstruction-era law passed specifically to guarantee freed slaves the same contracting rights as white citizens. Reading that statute to prohibit private race-restricted grant programs is doctrinally clean: the text says "all persons" have the same right "to make and enforce contracts." The argument that Section 1981 protects only Black contract-makers was rejected by the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail (1976), almost fifty years ago. AAER did not invent the legal theory. It built the case infrastructure to use it.

Second, the settlements move faster than the appellate process. Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster restructured within weeks of being sued. Fearless settled within three months of the Eleventh Circuit ruling against it. The economic logic favors settlement: a multi-year defense costs more than rewriting a fellowship program, and a loss on the merits produces precedent that constrains the defendant's peers. From the corporation's seat, capitulation is rational. From the broader DEI-program ecosystem's seat, each settlement is a precedent regardless of whether a court issued one.

Third, the Eleventh Circuit ruling is not binding nationwide. The Sixth Circuit (Hello Alice), the Second Circuit (Pfizer), and other appellate jurisdictions have addressed standing and other threshold issues without producing parallel rulings on Section 1981's substantive scope. A circuit split is plausible. If one develops, the question reaches the Supreme Court the same way SFFA did: with Blum's organization in the lead position, ready with the test case.

The broader corporate DEI rollback has multiple drivers. Consumer pressure on companies like Harley-Davidson and John Deere operates through commercial channels. The legal channel operates through Blum's organization and a handful of others using doctrines that the Supreme Court refreshed in 2023. The underlying empirical question of what these programs actually accomplished, covered in DEI by the Numbers, is the question the litigation does not address. The cases are about who can be eligible, not about what works.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. The article documents corporate commitments including Fearless Fund's $20,000 Strivers Grant Contest for Black women business owners, Pfizer's Breakthrough Fellowship, law-firm diversity fellowships at Perkins Coie, Morrison Foerster, Winston & Strawn, and Adams & Reese, and Comcast's RISE program.

The outcomes. The Eleventh Circuit ruled June 3, 2024 that the Fearless Strivers Grant likely violated 42 U.S.C. § 1981; Fearless Fund settled in September 2024 and closed the program.

The core question. Blum's legal strategy exploits a real ambiguity: the line between programs that consider race as one factor among many and programs that set numerical outcomes by race is not always clear in practice. That ambiguity is now a litigation risk for every corporate DEI program with explicit demographic targets.

Compare with Goldman Sachs Board Diversity IPO Rule.

Related reading

• Goldman Sachs Board Diversity IPO Rule
• The Great DEI Retreat: 2024-2025
• DEI by the Numbers
• Harvard DEI Administrative Expansion
• The Diversity Consulting ROI Problem

Sources

Verified May 2026.

• SFFA v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (June 29, 2023). supremecourt.gov.
• American Alliance for Equal Rights press release on Fearless Fund settlement, September 2024. americanallianceforequalrights.org.
• 42 U.S. Code Section 1981, Cornell Legal Information Institute.
• AAER v. Fearless Foundation, Eleventh Circuit ruling, June 3, 2024. Summarized at cof.org.
• PR Newswire, AAER files lawsuit against Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster, August 22, 2023.
• Do No Harm v. Pfizer, Second Circuit case summary, FindLaw.
• American Bar Association, Private Affirmative Action After SFFA, Summer 2024.
• Council on Foundations, AAER v. Fearless Foundation Settlement Update.