Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

For more information on Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., visit Britannica.com.

(b. Suffolk, Va., 19 Nov. 1907; d. Richmond, Va., 25 Aug. 1998; interred Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond), associate justice, 1972–1987. Universally respected, admired, and indeed loved, Powell was a reluctant nominee to the Court. He repeatedly declined President Richard Nixon's entreaties to let him be designated for membership on the tribunal, at last relenting in October 1971. To the manner born and educated, Powell was one of America's most renowned attorneys and a descendant of distinguished old Virginia families. (The first Powell, one of the original Jamestown colonists, arrived on Virginia's soil in 1607.) A native of Suffolk in Virginia's Tidewater region, the future justice attended Washington and Lee College in Lexington, Virginia, where he graduated first in his class in 1929. He received his law degree there in 1931, completing the course in two instead of the usual three years. A year later, he received his LL.M. from Harvard, where he studied under Felix Frankfurter and Dean Roscoe Pound.

Powell then joined the Richmond law firm of Christian, Barton, and Parker, but after two years commenced a long and happy association with the law firm of Hunton, Williams, Anderson, and Moore (later to become the powerful and large firm of Hunton and Williams). It was interrupted for three years by his service as a much‐decorated air force intelligence officer in World War II. On his return, he soon rose to influential positions in the community as well as the profession, including such prestigious plums as the chairmanship or presidencies of the American Bar Association, the American College of Trial Lawyers, the Richmond School Board, the Virginia State Board of Education, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Virginia State Library Board, and the Virginia Constitutional Revision Commission.

Although a part of Virginia's conservative establishment and a product of the segregated South, as chair of the Richmond School Board during the 1950s Powell denounced the Byrd organization's antidesegregation policy of “interposition,” as “a lot of rot.” Still, his overall record on desegregation while on the school board was marked by relative inaction. Only a few black students in Richmond were attending desegregated public schools by the end of his eight‐year tenure as chair, and during his subsequent term of service on the State Board of Education, Powell proved unwilling to offend the state's pro‐segregation establishment. He complied, for example, with the state's tuition grant program, which reimbursed parents who sent their children to all‐white private academies. Viewed in light of the intransigence of most white Southerners, however, Powell earned a reputation as a racial moderate.

On his nomination to the Supreme Court, the American Bar Association's Committee on Judiciary termed him “the best person available” and Virginia's NAACP endorsed him. Confirmed by a vote of 89 to 1, Powell took the oath of office on 7 January 1972. He quickly became the Court's most popular member. Cautious and basically conservative, yet moderate and utterly nondoctrinaire, he was comfortable in the Court's center, often casting the decisive vote in such closely contested cases as those in the realm of the separation of church and state, where he was on the winning side in some thirty major decisions, more than any other member of the Court. He played a similar role in abortion cases, where his position prevailed in every one of the eighteen cases he heard. Because he frequently cast crucial votes as the tribunal's moderate “swing justice,” the fear of a different jurisprudential philosophy by his would‐be successor, Judge Robert H. Bork, contributed significantly to the latter's defeat (see Nominees, Rejection of).

Powell will probably be most remembered for his role in two cases. The first was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), where he struck down (5 to 4) rigid racial quotas in university admissions but, concurrently, upheld (5 to 4) the principle of “affirmative action.” The second case was Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), where he similarly attempted to find a middle position on the question of the constitutionality of antisodomy laws. Although he hoped to find a way to strike down the Georgia antisodomy statute without establishing a constitutional right to engage in homosexual activity, Powell ended up constituting part of the 5‐to‐4 majority that upheld the state law. Retiring in 1987, Powell admitted to a law school audience in 1990 that he “probably made a mistake” in joining the majority.

Bibliography

• Henry J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Clinton (1999).
• John C. Jeffries Jr., Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: A Biography (1994)

— Henry J. Abraham, revised by Timothy S. Huebner

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (born 1907) was a corporate lawyer who became a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He became the intellectual leader of the Court's moderate center until his 1987 retirement.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was born on September 19, 1907, in Suffolk, Virginia, son of a comfortable middle-class family. Powell attended Washington & Lee College, from which he graduated in 1929, and Harvard Law School, where he studied under Felix Frankfurter, completing a L.L.M. degree in 1932. Powell married Josephine M. Rucker on May 2, 1936, and was the father of three daughters and a son. Admitted to the Virginia bar, he entered private practice in Richmond in 1937 and became a partner in the prestigious Richmond firm of Hunton, Williams, Bay, Powell & Gibson. During World War II he served as an Air Force intelligence officer in North Africa. Returning to his Richmond practice, he gained national recognition as a corporate lawyer, subsequently serving on the board of directors of 11 major companies. A pillar of the American legal establishment, Powell served as president of the American Bar Association (1964-1965), president of the American College of Trial Lawyers (1968-1970), and president of the American Bar Foundation (1969-1971). His service as vice president of the National Legal Aid and Defender Society was instrumental in securing support of the organized bar for government-subsidized legal service for poor people.

Active in community affairs, Powell was chairman of the Richmond School Board, where during the late 1950s and 1960s he urged a moderate course in complying with Brown v. Board of Education and kept the Richmond schools open despite calls for "massive resistance" to desegregation. He led in the voluntary desegregation of Washington & Lee University. He was not, however, a leader in bringing racial equality to the South. The Fourth Circuit Court ruled in 1965 that practices of the Richmond School Board under Powell's leadership unconstitutionally perpetuated racial segregation (Bradley v. School Board of Richmond).

Appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon in 1972, Powell was viewed as cautious and pragmatic, with a skepticism for doctrinaire solutions. He was also distrustful of governmental interference in private affairs and committed to logical analysis as an aid to predictability and principled decision making. Powell quickly emerged as the intellectual leader of the Court's moderate center. He also sought to limit access to the courts by persons seeking to litigate generalized grievances. In U.S.v. Richardson (1974) he went out of his way to warn of the dangers to a democratic society of an overly activist judiciary. His personal biases also came out in business cases, where his decisions failed to strike the note of reasoned moderation that prevailed through much of the rest of his jurisprudence.

Powell was generally charry toward government regulation. On anti-trust opinions he tended to favor the business attacked. He voted against organized labor and was unenthusiastic about environmental and consumer protection, urging an extremely narrow reading of the Truth-In-Lending Act to exclude many installment transactions from its coverage (Mourningv. Family Publications Service, Inc. [1973]).

Powell's balance did show in a number of fields. In criminal law he generally ruled to increase the authority of law enforcement officials to obtain information and to decrease the zone of privacy that the individual had against government. He tended to narrow the Fifth Amendment's guarantees against self-incrimination. He refused to sustain the government's power to wiretap, however, maintaining that wiretapping was search and seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment (U.S. v. U.S. District Court [1972]). On the other hand, he rejected the contention that the Fourth and Fifth amendments interlocked to provide a broad privacy area immune from governmental intrusion. Instead, he took the literal language of each amendment and read it narrowly. On the "exclusionary" rule, Powell was hostile, arguing it impeded successful law enforcement. He rejected the view that capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment, but also the view that no constitutional constraints restricted its use. Rather, he favored a middle course, suggesting the states enact mandatory capital punishment laws (Furman v. Georgia [1972]).

In the civil liberties area, Powell was strongly separationist on matters of church and state, striking out particularly at various forms of aid to parochial schools (Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty v. Nyquist [1973]). He supported the Court's decision in Roev. Wade (1973) and wrote a strong opinion reasserting women's constitutional right to end their pregnancies in 1983. In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) he found the public's right to know more important than the state's interest in regulating corporations and wrote a seminal opinion granting First Amendment protection to corporate speech.

In the equal protection field Powell was more critical of racial discrimination in employment than he was in education, although he agreed that the 1966 Civil Rights Act reached discrimination in private schools (Runyon v. McCrary [1976]). He joined Justice William O. Douglas in denouncing the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation, calling for enforced national standards in that area. On bussing to achieve integration, he opposed large-scale, long-distance bussing requirements in metropolitan areas.

Powell's best known opinion was in California Board of Regents v. Bakke (1978), where he cast the deciding vote and wrote the authoritative individual opinion. In it he invalidated rigid racial quotas in admissions, but upheld the discretion to use race as a factor in establishing an affirmative action program. The opinion reflected Powell's judicial experience, representing a careful move between polar extremes which enabled compromise and supplied sensitive - if conservative - guidelines for future rulings.

In the preface of a 1994 biography on Justice Powell, the author mentions that shortly before Lewis Powell retired from the Supreme Court, a civil liberties leader called him "the most powerful man in America." The statement, the author continues, refers to Powell's ideological center of a divided Court, and revealed the remarkable degree to which liberals had come to depend on the conservative from Virginia. President Nixon had not anticipated Powell's role as an occasional liberal when he appointed him to the Court sixteen years earlier. Unlike the other Nixon appointees, Powell proved to be highly independent, open to argument and willing to reconsider his own preconceptions.

He retired from the Supreme Court in 1987 citing age and health problems. In addition to urological problems, he suffered at night from a concerning pain in his legs. He had a blood infection in 1988 and in 1989, he contracted pneumonia while sitting on an appeals court in Florida. Powell then began to black out for no apparent reason until it was discovered that cardiac arrhythmia was to blame. A cardiac pacemaker remedied the problem, only after he suffered a fall with a resultant broken hip. His recuperation kept him sidelined until early 1991. Despite his setbacks, he continued to work, maintaining an office in the Supreme Court with a secretary, a messenger, and one clerk.

Fearing a lack of activity, he decided to chair Chief Justice Rehnquist's committee on habeas corpus in capital cases, to deliver lectures, to spend several weeks in residence at the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee, to receive various awards and honorary degrees and to sit on appeals courts in Richmond and elsewhere. He continued to do the work in which he had devoted his life.

Further Reading

Powell's career through the late 1970s is detailed well in Leon Friedman, editor, The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions, vol. V (1978). Useful sketches are also included in Catherine A. Barnes, Men of the Supreme Court: Profiles of the Justices (1978), and in the Congressional Quarterly Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court (1979). J. Harvie Wilkinson, Serving Justice: A Supreme Court Clerk's View (1974) is an interesting and sympathetic account of the author's association with the justice as well as a revealing look at the inside of the Court.

For Powell's impact on the Supreme Court and on the nation, see John C. Jefferies, Jr., Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1994). The book does not make an attempt to survey the nearly three thousand decisions rendered by the Supreme Court while Powell was a member, instead it focuses on six areas of commanding interest: desegregation, abortion, Watergate, the death penalty, affirmative action, and sexual equality.

• Born: Sept. 19, 1907, Suffolk, Va.
• Education: Washington and Lee University, B.S., 1929; Washington and Lee University Law School, LL.B., 1931; Harvard Law School, LL.M., 1932
• Previous government service: chairman, Richmond School Board, Va., 1952–61; Virginia State Board of Education, 1961–69; president, Virginia State Board of Education, 1968–69
• Appointed by President Richard Nixon Oct. 21, 1971; replaced Hugo L. Black, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Dec. 6, 1971, by an 89–1 vote; retired June 26, 1987
• Died: Aug. 25, 1998, Richmond, Va.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., belonged to a respected family with deep roots in Virginia. The first American Powell was one of the original settlers of Jamestown in 1607.

Though a member of the Virginia establishment, Powell opposed the long-established practice of racial segregation in the public schools. As chairman of the Richmond School Board, he presided over the peaceful integration of the city's schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. He also stood up to leading Virginians who resisted statewide integration of schools. As a member of the Virginia State Board of Education, he led the successful racial integration of the state's public schools.

As a justice of the Supreme Court, Powell tried to balance the needs of society against the rights of individuals. His most famous opinion for the Court was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), a case about the legality of a plan that provided special opportunities for minority group applicants (such as African Americans) to gain admission to the university. Powell characteristically sought the middle ground between competing claims for preferences based on race and equality of individual rights in decisions about whom to admit to the state university. Powell decided against the establishment of rigid racial quotas for minorities seeking admission to the university. However, he also upheld the principle of “affirmative action” as one factor, among others, that could be considered in making decisions about admitting students to the university. Affirmative action means making a special effort to provide opportunities for members of groups that had been discriminated against in the past. Considering the racial identity of an applicant as a positive factor in making a decision about student admissions could be done to compensate for the negative effects of past discrimination.

See also Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

Sources

• Donna. Haupt, “A Justice Reflects”, Constitution 2, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 16–25.
• Jacob W. Landynski, “Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: Balance Wheel of the Court”, in The Burger Court: Political and Judicial Profiles, edited by Charles M. Lamb and Stephen C. Halpern (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)

Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1972 to 1987. Powell, who came to the Court as one of the most distinguished lawyers in the United States, was a moderate conservative who became a key "swing" vote on a Court that became divided between conservatives and liberals.

Powell was born on November 19, 1907, in Suffolk, Virginia. A descendant of Virginia families who reached back to the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, Powell attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1929 and a law degree in 1931. He earned a master's degree from Harvard Law School in 1932.

He then entered law practice in Richmond, where he remained until he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1971. His legal career was interrupted by World War II, when he served as an Air Force intelligence officer. Powell's reputation grew nationally during the 1950s and 1960s. He was elected president of the American Bar Association in 1964 and president of the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1968.

Unlike many Supreme Court appointees, Powell did not enter politics. He did, however, distinguish himself as a member and president of the Richmond Public School Board from 1952 to 1961, and later he was a member of the Virginia Board of Education. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), which prohibited state-imposed racial segregation in public schools, many southern communities pledged to defy or evade the Court decision. Some school boards closed the schools and encouraged attendance at white-only private schools, and others refused to integrate. Powell, as president of the Richmond Public School Board, peacefully integrated the school system and publicly called for cooperation rather than resistance to the integration of society.

President Richard M. Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court in October 1971. Nixon had offered earlier appointments, but Powell had refused. He was easily confirmed and took his seat in January 1972. He joined a Court that was moving from a liberal majority to a more conservative makeup. Powell was a conservative on crime and law enforcement but was a strong defender of integration and civil rights. In the 1980s, as the Court grew more conservative, Powell moved to the middle and often provided the vote that broke a 4-4 deadlock.

He played a key role in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. 2d 750 (1978), which dealt with the legality of affirmative action plans to remedy past racial discrimination. Powell wrote the opinion of the Court, holding that a university may consider the race of an applicant as part of its admission procedures. Powell also found, however, that the particular special admissions program at issue in the case had unlawfully discriminated against Allen Bakke, a white applicant, by denying him admission to medical school solely on the basis of his race.

Powell also wrote the majority opinion in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S. Ct. 1712, 90 L. Ed. 2d 69 (1986), which prohibited prosecutors from excluding prospective jurors on the basis of race. Under the Batson test, a defendant may object to a prosecutor's peremptory challenge (a removal of a prospective juror without alleging a reason). The prosecutor then must "come forward with a neutral explanation for challenging black jurors." If a neutral explanation cannot be made, the juror will not be excused.

Powell retired from the Court in 1987.

Lewis F. Powell
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
In office January 7, 1972 – June 26, 1987
Nominated by	Richard M. Nixon
Preceded by	Hugo Black
Succeeded by	Anthony Kennedy
Born	September 19, 1907(1907-09-19) Suffolk, Virginia
Died	August 25, 1998 (aged 90) Richmond, Virginia
Alma mater	Washington and Lee University Harvard Law School
Religion	Presbyterian

Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (September 19, 1907 – August 25, 1998) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He developed a reputation as a judicial moderate, and was known as a master of compromise and consensus-building. He was also widely well-regarded by contemporaries due to his personal good manners and politeness.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Virginia government 3 The Powell Memorandum 4 Supreme Court tenure 5 Retirement 6 External links 7 References

Early life

Powell was born in Suffolk, Virginia. He attended Washington and Lee University, garnering both an undergraduate and a law degree from that university. He was elected president of student body as an undergraduate and was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. At a leadership conference, he met Edward R. Murrow and they became close friends. He attended Harvard Law School for a master's degree.

During World War II, he spent more than three years in Europe and North Africa. He started as a First Lieutenant, and eventually rose to the rank of Colonel. He worked mostly in intelligence, decoding German messages.

Powell was a partner for over a quarter of a century at Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson, a large Virginia law firm, with its primary office in Richmond (now known as Hunton & Williams LLP). Powell practiced primarily in the areas of corporate law (especially in the field of mergers and acquisitions) and in railway litigation law.

In 1936, he married Josephine Pierce Rucker, with whom he had three daughters and one son. Powell's wife died in 1996.

Virginia government

Powell also played an important role in local community affairs. From 1952 to 1961, he was Chairman of the Richmond School Board. Powell presided over the school board at a time when the Commonwealth of Virginia was locked in a campaign of defiance against the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. (Interestingly, Powell's law firm had represented one of the defendant school districts in the case that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court under the "Brown" label. Powell did not take any part in his law firm's representation of that client school district. The lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, later became one of the five cases decided under the caption Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954.) The Richmond School Board had no authority at the time to force integration, however, as control over attendance policies had been transferred to the state government. Powell, like most white Southern leaders of his day, did not speak out against the state's defiance, though he would foster a close relationship with many black leaders, such as civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill, some of whom offered key support for Powell's nomination. Powell proudly swore in Virginia's first black governor, Douglas Wilder, in 1990. Powell was President of the American Bar Association from 1964-1965, where he enjoyed an enormously productive tenure. Powell led the way in attempting to provide legal services to the poor, and he made a key decision to cooperate with the federal government's Legal Services Program.

Powell was involved in the development of Colonial Williamsburg, where he was both a trustee and general counsel. In 1971, he wrote the famous Powell Memo to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the U.S. and may have sparked the formation of one or more influential right-wing think tanks.

The Powell Memorandum

In August 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's request to become Associate Justice of Supreme Court, Lewis Powell had sent to the leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the "Confidential Memorandum", better known as the Powell Memorandum, and still under the radar of general public. It sounded an alarm with its title, "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System." The previous decade had seen the increasing regulation of many industries and, as Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements.

In an extraordinary prefiguring of the social goals of business that would be felt over the next three decades, Powell set his main goal: Changing how individuals and society think about the corporation, the government, the law, the culture, and the individual. Shaping public opinion on these topics became, and would remain, a major goal of business.

He had been a board member of Philip Morris between 1964 until his appointment in 1971, and had acted as a contact point for the tobacco industry with the Virginia Commonwealth University. Through his law firm, Hunton Williams Gay Powell & Gibson (later just Hunton & Williams) he represented the Tobacco Institute and the various tobacco companies in numerous law cases.

Supreme Court tenure

In 1969, President Nixon asked him to join the Supreme Court; but Powell turned him down. In 1971, Nixon asked him again. Powell was unsure, but Nixon and his Attorney General, John N. Mitchell, persuaded him that joining the Court was his duty to his nation. One of the primary concerns Powell had was the effect leaving his law firm and joining the high court would have on his personal financial status, as he enjoyed a very lucrative private practice at his law firm. Another of Powell's major concerns was that, as a corporate attorney, he would be unfamiliar with many of the issues that would come before the Supreme Court, which at that time, as today, heard very few corporate law cases. Powell feared this would place him at a disadvantage and make it unlikely he would be able to influence his colleagues.

He and William Rehnquist were nominated by President Nixon on the same day to serve on the Court. Powell took over the seat of Hugo Black. On the day of Powell's swearing-in, when Rehnquist's wife Nan asked Josephine Powell if this was the most exciting day of her life, Josephine reportedly said, "No, it is the worst day of my life. I am about to cry."

Lewis Powell served from January 7, 1972 until June 26, 1987, when he resigned.

Powell compiled a decidedly moderate record on the Court, cultivating a reputation as a swing vote with a penchant for compromise. (The most detailed account of Justice Powell's Supreme Court tenure is in John Jeffries's biography Lewis F. Powell). While on the court, he worked hard at familiarizing himself with the issues and arguments in the cases and coming up with distinct and well-reasoned positions on them.

For example, his opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), joined by no other justice in full, represented a compromise between the opinions of Justice William J. Brennan, who, joined by three other justices, would have upheld affirmative action programs under a lenient judicial test, and the opinion of John Paul Stevens, also joined by three justices, who would have struck down the affirmative action program at issue in the case under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Powell's opinion striking down the law urged that "strict scrutiny" be applied to affirmative action programs, while hinting that some affirmative action programs might pass Constitutional muster. Powell, who dissented in the case of Furman v. Georgia (1972), striking down capital punishment statutes, was a key mover behind the Court's compromise opinion in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), which allowed the return of capital punishment but only with procedural safeguards.

In the controversial case of Snepp v. U.S. (1980), the Court issued a per curiam upholding the lower court's imposition of a constructive trust upon former CIA agent Frank Snepp and its requirement that he preclear all his published writings with the CIA for the rest of his life. In 1997, Snepp gained access to the files of Justices Thurgood Marshall (who had already died) and William Brennan (who voluntarily granted Snepp access), and confirmed his suspicion that Powell had been the author of the per curiam opinion. Snepp later claimed that Powell had misstated the factual record and had not reviewed the actual case file, and that the only Justice who even looked at the case file was John Paul Stevens, who relied upon it in composing his dissent.^[1] From his days in counter-intelligence during World War II, Powell had developed a great respect for the need for government secrecy, a concern he also urged on his colleagues during the Court's consideration of 1974's United States v. Nixon.

Powell was the swing vote in Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U.S. 186 (1986), opting to go with the majority ruling which upheld Georgia's sodomy laws. He was reportedly distressed over how to vote. A conservative clerk advised him to uphold the ban, and Powell, who believed he had never met a gay person (not realizing that one of his own clerks was a closeted homosexual), voted to uphold Georgia's law, though Powell in a concurring opinion expressed concern at the length of the prison terms prescribed by the law. [1] The Court, 17 years later, expressly overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

In 1990, after his retirement from the Court, he said, "I think I made a mistake in the Hardwick case," marking one of the few times a justice expressed regret for one of his previous votes. ^[2]

Powell also expressed post-retirement regret over his majority opinion in McCleskey v. Kemp, where he voted to uphold the death penalty against a study that demonstrated that - except as punishment for the most violent of crimes - people who killed whites were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty as punishment for their crimes than people who killed blacks. ^[3]

Retirement

Powell was nearly 80 years old when he retired from his position as Supreme Court justice. His career on the bench was summed up by Gerald Gunther, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford Law School, as "truly distinguished" because of his "qualities of temperament and character," which "made it possible for him, more than any contemporary, to perform his tasks in accordance with the modest, restrained, yet creative model of judging."^[4]

He was succeeded by Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy was the third nominee for his position. The first, Robert Bork, was not confirmed by the United States Senate. The second, Douglas H. Ginsburg, withdrew his name from consideration after admitting to having smoked marijuana both as a college undergraduate and as a law professor with his students.

Following his retirement from the high court, Powell sat regularly on various United States Courts of Appeals around the country, especially enjoying sitting on circuit courts venued in temperate climes during the winter months.^{[citation needed]}

Justice Powell died at his home in the Windsor Farms area of Richmond, Virginia, of pneumonia, at 4:30 in the morning of August 25, 1998, at the age of 90. He is buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery.

In her 2002 book, The Majesty of the Law, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "For those who seek a model of human kindness, decency, exemplary behavior, and integrity, there will never be a better man."

Powell's personal and official papers were donated to Washington and Lee University Law School, where they are open for research subject to certain restrictions.

J. Harvie Wilkinson, currently a judge on Fourth Circuit, was a law clerk for Justice Powell. Wilkinson later wrote a book titled Serving Justice: A Supreme Court Clerk's View describing the experience.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

• Text of the Powell's Memorandum

References

1. ^ Frank Snepp, Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took On the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Secrecy and Free Speech (New York: Random House, 1999), 349-350.
2. ^ http://www.sodomylaws.org/usa/useditorial08.htm
3. ^ John C. Jeffries, Jr., JUSTICE LEWIS F. POWELL, JR.: A BIOGRAPHY 451 (1994).
4. ^ Freeman, Anne Hobson: The Style of A Law Firm (1989), Algonquin Books, p. 193.

Legal offices
Preceded by Hugo Black	Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States January 7, 1972 – June 26, 1987	Succeeded by Anthony Kennedy

Supreme Court of the United States

The Burger Court Chief Justice: Warren Earl Burger (1969–1986) 1972–1975: Wm. O. Douglas | Wm. J. Brennan | P. Stewart | B. White | T. Marshall | H. Blackmun | L.F. Powell, Jr. | Wm. Rehnquist 1975–1981: Wm. J. Brennan | P. Stewart | B. White | T. Marshall | H. Blackmun | L.F. Powell, Jr. | Wm. Rehnquist | J.P. Stevens 1981–1986: Wm. J. Brennan | B. White | T. Marshall | H. Blackmun | L.F. Powell, Jr. | Wm. Rehnquist | J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor The Rehnquist Court Chief Justice: William Hubbs Rehnquist (1986–2005) 1986–1987: Wm. J. Brennan | B. White | T. Marshall | H. Blackmun | L.F. Powell, Jr. | J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia

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