By Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to block an elite Virginia public high school's admissions policy - designed to increase its racial and socioeconomic diversity - that was challenged by a group that said the rules discriminated against Asian Americans who make up the majority of its student body.
The justices denied a request by the group, Coalition for TJ, to reinstate a federal judge's February ruling that stopped Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria from using the recently devised admissions policy.
Three conservative justices on the nine-member court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, said in the brief court order that they would have granted the request.
The case is the latest front in a legal battle in the United States over school admissions policies involving or affecting the racial composition of campuses.
The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put Judge Claude Hilton's February ruling striking down the high school's admissions policy on hold while litigation over the admissions policy's legality moved forward.
The Supreme Court is due later this year to hear cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that give its conservative majority a chance to end affirmative action policies used by universities to increase enrollment of Black and Hispanic students.
Thomas Jefferson is a magnet school with a selective admissions policy that has had chronic underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students.
The school board adopted a new admissions process that ended a standardized testing requirement and guaranteed seats for the top students from each public middle school in the surrounding area.
Coalition for TJ, represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the school board last year, arguing that the new admissions policy discriminated against Asian American students.