![]() He officially joined the court in January 1972, at the same time as Associate Justice William H. The nomination drew wide praise and Powell won Senate confirmation on an 89-1 vote. “Ten years of Lewis Powell on the court was worth 20 years of anyone else,” Nixon said at the time. He believed he was too old at age 64 to start a judicial career and relented only after the president called personally to say it was his duty to serve. Finally, in 1971, he reluctantly accepted Nixon’s nomination. The Nixon White House, eager to appoint a Southerner to the court, had twice approached Powell but he rejected those overtures. He did not aspire to serve on the nation’s highest court, however. He was a member of the school board, served on the state education board and raised money for legal aid for the poor.” He had a sense he owed a lot to his country and to his community and he spent years serving in a variety of thankless tasks. Jeffries, said Powell “came from an older and grander tradition where the lawyer was a public citizen. His biographer, University of Virginia law professor John C. “All of us admire your extraordinary capacity to forcefully participate in our private and public debates without ever allowing advocacy to degenerate into contentiousness,” the justices said in a letter to Powell upon his retirement. ![]() “He graced the lives of all who had the privilege of his company and counsel.” “I have known no one in my lifetime who is kinder or more courteous than he,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who formed an especially close bond with Powell when she joined the formerly all-male court in 1981. California voters amended the state’s Constitution in 1996 to prohibit preferential treatment by race in the state’s colleges.Īmong his Supreme Court colleagues, Powell is remembered best not for particular decisions but as an uncommonly sweet, gentle and courteous man. However, he wrote separately to say that race can be taken into account as “a plus factor” when evaluating individual minority applicants.ĭespite two decades of debate and dispute since, Powell’s formula has remained the federal constitutional standard governing affirmative action in colleges and universities. Joining four conservative colleagues, Powell rejected the use of such quotas or fixed formulas that reserved positions for black, Latino or Asian students.
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