Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., was born on September 19, 1907, in Suffolk, Virginia, the eldest child of Lewis F. Powell (who changed the spelling of his first name to “Louis” shortly before his son was born) and Mary Lewis Gwathmey Powell. He was related to Captain Nathaniel Powell, one of the original Jamestown settlers and an acting governor of the colony in the 17th century.
Lewis grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where his father ran a successful business making a variety of wooden and corrugated boxes. His early education was in public schools, but he entered McGuire’s University School in Richmond when he was 14 years old.
When the time came for Powell to attend college, he chose to enroll in Washington and Lee rather than, as his father wished, the University of Virginia. In 1929 he obtained his B.S. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the School of Commerce and Administration, and two years later he graduated first in his class from the Washington and Lee Law School. At the insistence of his father, who wanted the best educational opportunities for his son, Powell followed his career at Washington and Lee with a year at Harvard Law School, where he received his master’s degree in law in June 1932.
After Harvard, Powell returned home to Richmond, where he took a position with the law firm of Christian, Barton, and Parker. By 1934 he had left this firm to join Hunton, Williams, Anderson, Gay, and Moore, Richmond’s largest law firm. Two years later, on May 2, 1926, he married Josephine (“Jo”) M. Rucker, with whom he had four children: Josephine McRae, Ann Pendleton, Mary Lewis Gwathmey, and Lewis F. Powell, III. Powell was a trial lawyer in the early days of his legal practice, but over the years he gradually spent more time advising and assisting corporations in the coxtduct of their businesses. In 1938 his firm made him a partner in less than half the time normally required for this advancement. Three years later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the nation into World War II, and Powell wasted no time in trying to find a place in the military. He attempted to join the navy but was turned down when he failed to pass the eye exam. After enlisting in the army, Powell was eventually assigned to die Military Intelligence Service of the War Department, where he worked on the Ultra project, which involved the deciphering and use of German radio communications encrypted by the Enigma machine. After three and a half years of military service, Powell finally returned home to Richmond and his law firm in November 1945.
After the war, Powell combined an increasingly prominent corporate legal pracuce with a wide variety of civic activities. He was appointed to the Richmond School Board in 1950, elected in his own right in 1951, and made chairman from 1952 to 1961. From 1961 to 1969, he was a member of the Virginia State Board of Education, serving as its president from 1968 to 1969. These were turbulent years, as the state of Virginia first pledged massive resistance against desegregation and then reluctantly and slowly began to dismantle its segregated systems of public schools. Although Powell privately opposed Virginia’s policy of resistance to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that declared segregation illegal, he would later be criticized for having done litde publicly to further desegregation efforts, cither while on the Richmond School Board or while on the State Board of Education. During the 1960s, Powell also served as president of two prestigious legal organizations: the American Bar Association and the American College of Trial Lawyers. By the end of the decade he clearly was numbered among the most prominent lawyers in the nation.
By the beginning of the 1970s, Lewis Powell was nearing his mid-60s and had already compiled an impressive record as a lawyer and a citizen. But a further calhng still lay in front ofhim. In September 1971 Justice Hugo Black retired from the Court, enabling President Richard M. Nixon to make his third appointment to the Court. The previous year, after Justice Abe Fortas had resigned, the president had suffered two embarrassing political defeats when he attempted to appoint first one and then another southerner to fill Fortas’s seat— Clement Haynsworth, Jr., and G. Harrold Carswell. Though Powell was a Democrat, he was nevertheless moderately conservative and seemed to share some of Nixon’s law-and-order priorities. Moreover, his stature within the American bar made it unlikely that his appointment would receive the same rough senatorial treatment as Haysworth’s and Carswell’s had. Thus, on October 22, 1971, Nixon nominated Powell as an associate justice; on December 6, by a vote of 89-1, the Senate confirmed the nomination. Powell took the oath of office as an associate justice on the Supreme Court on January 7, 1972, beginning a 16-year career of service on the Court.
On June 26, 1987, the man who had reluctantly accepted an appointment to the Court retired from it with equal reluctance. Powell hesitated to give up the work in which he found great reward, but his strength had begun to diminish. After retirement, he continued to hear cases on the federal court of appeals and taught courses at the University of Virginia Law School and Washington and Lee University School of Law.
In cases involving the rights of criminal suspects and defendants, Powell’s decisions on the Court generally vindicated Nixon’s expectations. He tended to side with conservative colleagues who, while not overruling those cases decided the previous decade that had greatly expanded the constitutional protections in the criminal process, nevertheless managed to construe these protections narrowly in many cases. He also dissented vehemently when a bare majority of the Court pronounced a national moratorium on the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia. (1972). Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Powell joined two other centrist justices on the Court in a controlling opinion that upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty as long as certain requirements were met.
During the decade of the 1970s, the Court wrestled with the question of whether and to what extent the Constitution protected certain unnamed or unenumerated rights. Powell hovered at the Court’s center on these questions. He joined in the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973), which found that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to an abortion as fundamental. But that same year, he wrote the opinion for the Court in San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), which denied that there was a fundamental right to a public education. In Rodriguez, children in poorer Texas school districts had complained that the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund a significant portion of public education denied them an equal educational opportunity, since their districts contained less property wealth and therefore generated less revenue from property taxes. Powell, though—long experienced in public school affairs himself—declared for the Court that the interest in maintaining local control over public schools was sufficient to justify the inequalities inevitably produced by reliance on property taxes to finance public education. The following decade, Pow'ell cast the decisive vote—one he later believed to have been wrong—in the Supreme Court’s decision upholding a state antisodomy statute in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
Powell’s position at the center of the Court was nowhere more apparent than in his opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). The case posed the issue of whether a medical school’s affirmative action program violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court split sharply over the issue, with four justices prepared to uphold both a fixed quota for racial minorities and a more informal use of minority status as a “plus” factor in the admissions determination, and four justices adamant that both forms of affirmative action violated federal civil rights laws. Powell lay squarely in the middle of these polar positions. He concluded in an opinion that controlled the case that the use of a fixed racial quota violated the equal protection clause but that universities might use an applicant’s status as a racial minority as one “plus” factor among others designed to increase the educational diversity of an institution. Powell’s middle position became the law of the land.
On May 2, 1926, he married Josephine (“Jo”) M. Rucker, with whom he had four children: Josephine McRae, Ann Pendleton, Mary Lewis Gwathmey, and Lewis F. Powell, III.
