NEW YORK — Boyce F. Martin Jr., a defiantly liberal federal appellate judge whose rulings in two seminal cases — on favoring minority applicants in college admissions and on upholding President Obama’s requirement that Americans buy health insurance — were upheld by the Supreme Court, died June 1 at his home in Louisville, Ky. He was 80.
The cause was brain cancer, his son Boyce R. Martin III said.
In 2002, Boyce Martin Jr. wrote for the majority in a bitterly divided 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Grutter v. Bollinger, the affirmative action case involving the University of Michigan Law School. (The court sits in Cincinnati and covers Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee.)
He ruled that higher education recruiters could seek a “critical mass’’ of black and Hispanic students to achieve racial, ethnic, and intellectual diversity among their newcomers.
The decision was affirmed by the US Supreme Court, 5-4, in 2003, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writing the majority opinion.
Lee C. Bollinger, a former dean of the law school and then the incoming president of Columbia University, warned at the time that “a ruling that race and ethnicity could not constitutionally be considered in admissions would be drastic and disheartening, threatening a decline in minority enrollment of as much as 70 to 75 percent.’’
Mr. Martin’s decision in the health insurance case, in 2011, followed the first appellate review of the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
His majority opinion for a three-judge panel upheld a lower-court ruling that Congress was empowered by the commerce clause of the Constitution to require that Americans purchase medical insurance.
A split Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the 6-3 majority, upheld the requirement, but said it was sanctioned by Congress’ power to tax, not its authority to regulate interstate commerce.
While Mr. Martin was generally a traditionalist in adhering to precedent, he peppered his opinions with citations from popular culture. He quoted Homer Simpson in an employment law case and the lyrics to the John Prine song “Paradise,’’ about coal mining in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, in an environmental ruling.
In 2012, he delivered a 19-page opinion extolling the singularity of Kentucky bourbon in affirming a trademark-infringement decision against Jose Cuervo, a tequila brand. His opinion for a unanimous appeals panel found that the red dripping wax seal on Cuervo’s premium $100 Reserva de la Familia tequila bottles too closely resembled the signature coating that had covered the cap of Maker’s Mark bourbon since 1958.
Quoting Justice Hugo Black, Mr. Martin said he “was brought up to believe that Scotch whisky would need a tax preference to survive in competition with Kentucky bourbon’’ and declared, “All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.’’
A fierce opponent of the death penalty and the author of an opinion voiding a Michigan law banning what abortion opponents call partial-birth abortions, Mr. Martin drew fire from conservatives for his opinions and his judicial practices.
Danny J. Boggs, a fellow appeals judge, accused him of delaying a vote in the affirmative action case, in which the 6th Circuit ruled, 5-4, until two conservative judges were no longer eligible to participate in the ruling.
An internal report by another appellate judge, Alice M. Batchelder, concluded that Mr. Martin’s conduct raised “an inference that misconduct has occurred,’’ but no further action was taken.
Mr. Martin said Batchelder’s conclusion was “factually incorrect.’’
Boggs also accused Mr. Martin and his liberal colleagues of frivolously issuing stays of execution in capital punishment cases based on pretexts as flimsy as “a hot dog label.’’
But in a 2005 dissent, Mr. Martin said that in his experience, “only one conclusion is possible: That the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.’’
When Mr. Martin retired in 2013 after 34 years on the 6th Circuit court, an inquiry into his travel reimbursements, initiated by a conservative colleague, was referred to the Justice Department.
The department decided not to pursue the complaint after Mr. Martin voluntarily repaid the entire $138,500 he had received as reimbursements during a contested four-year period, even though, he said, only a fraction had been challenged.
Boyce Ficklen Martin Jr. was born in Boston on Oct. 23, 1935.
His father was an assistant dean at Harvard Business School and an economics professor. His mother was the former Helen Artt.
He graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina with a bachelor of arts degree in 1957 and from the University of Virginia School of Law, which he attended while serving in the Army Reserve.
After serving as a federal prosecutor, teaching and practicing privately, Mr. Martin was elected the first chief judge of Kentucky’s newly created Court of Appeals. President Jimmy Carter nominated him to the federal appeals court in 1979.
He was chief judge from 1996 to 2003.
His first wife, the former Mavin Hamilton Brown, died in 1997. They had four children.
In addition to his son Boyce, he leaves his second wife, the former Anne Brewer Ogden; another son, Robert C.G. Martin II; two daughters, Mavin H. Martin and Julie M. Hudson; eight granddaughters; a sister, Barbara Dudley; and a brother, W. Grier Martin.
