From 1955 to the mid-1970s, the high-water mark of the judicial activism inspired by the Warren Court, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans effectively remade the South. In ruling after ruling, its judges used law, reason and a fierce passion for justice to bury Jim Crow across the Old Confederacy. But the glory days are over, and Judge John Minor Wisdom, the Fifth's intellectual leader, is now 90 and in semiretirement. Last week, in a decision some saw as a reversal of the court's proud tradition, a three-judge panel of Reagan and Bush appointees took dead aim at the long-established use of racial preferences to achieve diversity in university admissions. "This is the A-bomb," said Mark Yu-dof, former dean at the University of Texas Law School, the defendant in the case. "Once you say race can't be taken into account, what is the law?"
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