A Vital Voice Is Lost, but His Principles Live : The law spoke for the powerless through Marshall, and a generation of lawyers listened.

It was June, 1954, and I was on my way back West after graduating from law school, when I heard over the car radio that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled unanimously, in Brown vs. Board of Education, against segregated schools. For an idealistic young lawyer, it was startling, exhilarating news. For the country, it marked the beginning of an era in which the court came to reflect our best traditions, our finest aspirations.

Thirteen years later, the lawyer who argued Brown for the plaintiffs was on the court himself, contributing to that process.

What Thurgood Marshall brought to the court, in addition to the usual requisites, was his sensitive perception of the law’s impact on ordinary human beings. The legal label might be the 14th Amendment, or freedom of speech, or due process, but Justice Marshall saw the human faces behind the label. He saw the faces of black children striving for equality, the faces of hungry people struggling for dignity, the faces of women burdened with unwanted pregnancy, the faces of people whose constitutional rights had been trammeled in the name of law and order, the faces of people who were different and determined to maintain their differences against the pressure for uniformity. He saw the faces of people who lacked a voice, and he gave them a voice, through his opinions, as earlier through his arguments. He brought soul.

Recently, and especially since the retirement of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., his soul-mate, Marshall’s voice on the court has been a lonely one, increasingly drowned out by those for whom efficiency and order seem to be principal values. And now that lonely voice, too, will be gone.

So what do I tell my students, those who are idealistic and see the law as having some important connection with justice? The same thing, I guess, that we should all tell ourselves, those of us who look fondly on the era of the Warren court: that these things go in cycles, that we continue to have an admirable constitutional system, that there still are legislatures and state constitutions, and that at least some of the contributions made by Justice Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues are too well-reasoned, too soundly structured, too deeply embedded in our national fabric simply to disappear.

Meanwhile, there is sadness.