The Supreme Court Justice Who Forever Changed Affirmative Action
Justice Lewis Powell’s ruling in the 1978 case <em>Regents v. Bakke</em> buoyed affirmative action—but in the process, it transformed how colleges think about race and equality in admissions.
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was on the fence in 1978. The Court had before it the case of a 35-year-old white man, Allan Bakke, who had twice been denied admission to the medical school at the University of California at Davis. Bakke claimed that he was unfairly rejected because of the school’s quota system, which reserved 16 seats in the 100-person class for minority students. Powell didn’t know it at the time, but his decision would come to shape the affirmative-action debate for the next 40
