“It means thousands of black, Latino and Native American students who are very talented will now get the chance to go to our law schools and medical schools,” Washington said.

The court voted 2-1 on Friday to erase a 2006 state law that prohibited institutions from giving favorable preference to citizens based on race, gender, color, ethnicity and other factors.

Judges determined the measure violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The court said, in part, that the previous law “alters Michigan’s political structure by impermissibly burdening racial minorities.”

State Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing, said affirmative action was intended to give priority to the underserved when deciding between two applicants of the same qualification.

“Affirmative action was never a quota — you have to have so many African Americans, so many women, so many Israelis, whatever,” Meadows said.

Society benefits from affirmative action because it allows equal opportunity for disadvantaged sections of the population, Meadows said, so the decision to eliminate the ban was a good one.

“There are areas in the state in which, because of historic racial discrimination, we have concentrations of individuals in underserved areas — (usually) larger urban areas — and that’s where we see failing,” Meadows said.

Washington said the K-12 education provided to black and Latino students generally is inferior, therefore making it hard for members of these groups to continue their schooling at institutes of higher learning.

“The inequalities are enormous and they are growing,” Washington said.

This ruling greatly will affect the University of Michigan as well as Wayne State University Law School and the university’s School of Medicine, which previously practiced affirmative action during the acceptance process, Washington said.

A few of MSU’s financial aid programs and its College of Veterinary Medicine as well as scholarship programs at Grand Valley State University could be affected by the overturning of this ban, he said. But because acceptance decisions for the 2011-12 academic year already have been made, and because state Attorney General Bill Schuette has plans to appeal this ruling, changes to university policy likely will not occur immediately.

MSU officials said this past week they have yet to determine the implications of the court’s vote.

“We are in the process of reviewing this complex opinion,” said Heather Swain, MSU’s interim vice president for media relations, in a statement.

The previous law — known as Proposal 2 to voters, and written into the state’s constitution as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative — passed by a margin of about 16 percent and covered both university admissions and government hiring.

Schuette said on Friday he plans to appeal the ruling, and will request a formal rehearing in front of the circuit’s full court.

“Entrance to our great universities must be based upon merit, and I will continue the fight for equality, fairness and rule of law,” Schuette said in a statement.

In the court’s lone dissenting opinion, Judge Julia Smith Gibbons said it is not clear Proposal 2 can be invalidated through the equal protection clause.

The court’s vote continues a long struggle between state university officials and the federal government in regards to affirmative action policies.

Previously, two cases on similar matters involving students at U-M had been taken before the Supreme Court. The justices found in a 2003 vote that race ultimately could be considered as a factor in admissions to the university’s law school, but affirmed that U-M could not set specific quotas for certain racial groups or distribute additional points in the process of undergraduate admissions.

Before the state’s 2006 ruling, MSU admitted about 701 black freshmen and sophomores in 2005. That figure dropped to 623 in 2009. Among Hispanic students, 154 gained admission in 2005, versus 151 four years later.