William Bradford Reynolds, 1942-2019 | Center for Equal Opportunity

Making the Case for Colorblind Law

News came the other day that William Bradford Reynolds had passed away, from cancer. He was 77.

It was in the summer of 1981 that President Reagan named Reynolds to run the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He was a surprising choice. Reynolds was a stellar litigator but had little experience in civil rights law. In an interview years ago for a book I was writing on the Reagan presidency, Reynolds said he had been hoping to be appointed to head up the Civil Division.

Prior to Reynolds’s appointment, William French Smith, the Attorney General, had given a speech in which he said Justice would no longer seek hiring and promotion goals—basically quotas—as remedies for violations of Title VII, the anti-discrimination employment statute of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, the department would insist on make-whole relief for actual, identifiable victims of discrimination, including back pay. Smith thought the change in enforcement was possible since Title VII did not, as an original matter, require numerical goals. Indeed, there were strong arguments that Title VII proscribed them.

It fell to Reynolds to carry out the new enforcement policy, and over the years he did so in case after case. Guiding the effort was the principled idea that government should neither favor nor disfavor individuals on grounds of race. By the fall of 1981 Reynolds was making the case explicitly for color-blind law. Here he was ahead of the class, you might say, as few Reagan appointees to civil rights positions proved inclined to make the case for the “colorblind ideal of equal opportunity for all,” as Reynolds put it.

Reynolds duly enforced the laws in his charge, though not always to the satisfaction of liberal Democrats. In 1985 Reagan named Reynolds to be the associate attorney general, the third-ranking position in the department. Senate Democrats opposed him, as did several Republicans, enough to defeat his nomination in committee. The confirmation process was plainly unfair, effectively a trial, but Reynolds did not grow bitter and resign: Not when there was so much he could do at the department.

Edwin Meese, appointed Attorney General in 1985, asked Reynolds to stay at the Civil Rights Division but also assume new duties when asked, which turned out to be often, an irritant to the civil rights liberals. This was how Reynolds became Meese’s and Reagan’s counselor on whom to appoint to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur. The process resulted in the selection first of Judge Antonin Scalia, in 1986, and then of Judge Robert Bork, in 1987. Scalia was confirmed, and Bork, hit by much the same assaultive politics that had greeted Reynolds two years earlier, was not.

Reynolds did not leave Justice until the end of the second Reagan term. Always, it seems, there was work for this tireless Reagan appointee, whose signal political achievement was to have helped strengthen the idea of colorblind law. May he rest in peace.

Related posts: