Justice Lewis Powell wrote a decision that tried to reconcile the two sides. He accepted the logic of his colleagues who found affirmative action appalling but voted with his colleagues who found it appealing. He thought it was wrong to penalize an individual like Bakke as a means of “compensation for past discrimination.” He thought admitting people on the basis of racial quotas was wrong. But he thought it would be okay for UC Davis to achieve the same result by filling its slots the way Harvard’s undergraduate admissions program did—not through quotas but through a “new definition of
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