This article examines the United States (U.S.) Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on affirmative action as it culminated in the Court’s recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard (2023) (SFFA). After contextualizing the U.S. model of affirmative action within a wider range of theoretical and policy positions on affirmative action found internationally and tracing the Court’s decisive role in shaping the U.S. model, this article presents and analyzes the Court’s reasoning in SFFA. It maps out points of legal and political contestation that will likely arise going forward, in particular surrounding questions about individualization, colorblindness, and “indirect affirmative action.” Finally, the article articulates and examines the prospects of taking SFFA as an occasion to re-evaluate the broader distributive contexts of educational opportunity in the United States, in particular the contexts of zero-sum competition that were seemingly presupposed by both the majority and the dissent in SFFA.