It has been a long, litigious road from Heman Sweatt, an African-American mail carrier who wanted to attend the prestigious, all-White law school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1946, to Abigail Fisher, a White high school student who failed to win undergraduate admission to the same university a half-century later. Depending on what the U.S. Supreme Court decides after hearing arguments this fall, the cases of Sweatt and Fisher may prove to be bookends in the battle over affirmative action at the flagship institution of the University of Texas system, a battle with wide ramifications for minority admissions to public colleges across the country. Fisher case is latest in a long history of Texas legal battles over race's role in higher education.