Today, President Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Debo Adegbile, withdrew his nomination and announced that he is returning to private practice. The Senate blocked Adegbile’s confirmation in March in large part because he once represented Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted  30 years ago of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. As I watched the nomination controversy unfold, I confess I was disappointed to see some loose conservative rhetoric suggesting that it is inherently wrongful to represent criminals accused of killing police officers. In my own view, there is nothing inherently troubling about an attorney representing a defendant charged with a heinous crime within the framework of the law. What is more problematic, however, was that the evidence that a wrongful conviction happened in this particular case is so weak.

Instead, I might have liked to see some of Adegbile’s stronger statements in favor of racial discrimination in college get additional public attention. As I noted at the Federalist Society’s Executive Branch Review blog a few months ago, “Adegbile was also counsel of record on an NAACP LDF brief filed in the Fisher v. University of Texas case, which vigorously defended the University of Texas’s use of race in admissions. This brief arguably went somewhat further in defending preferences than does Grutter v. Bollinger, including a section that is titled “Excluding race from individualized review would demean many students’ individual dignity” which notes that ‘Taken to an extreme, a purely race-neutral holistic process could result in a form of viewpoint discrimination.’ While Grutter holds that universities may constitutionally use race in admissions in certain circumstances, it is not commonly interpreted to hold that a university’s choice not to use race is harmful to students’ dignity or that a race-neutral process might result in viewpoint discrimination.”

I expect that I will probably disagree on some matters with whoever Obama’s new nominee to head the Civil Rights Division is. That’s what happens when the political party with views closest to my own loses a national election. Still, many plausible Democratic, liberal or progressive nominees would not go quite as far as Adegbile in stating that race-neutral admissions are harmful to students’ dignity and might result in viewpoint discrimination. Let us hope that this withdrawal leads Obama to nominate a Civil Rights Division leader who is a little more moderate on these matters.