The Constitution was also the product of a “literally unspeakable compromise” with slaveholders, as Mr. Dellinger was never shy to say, and needed to be understood in that light. In a guest essay for The Times last month, he came out strongly in support of President Biden’s public vow to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Rejecting Republican complaints that Mr. Biden’s promise was somehow “offensive,” Mr. Dellinger cited the “long and important tradition of presidents taking into consideration the demographic characteristics of prospective justices.” “Our history shows that the process of reaching out to expand the personal backgrounds of the justices has often produced stellar jurists who made historic contributions to the court and our judicial system,” he added.Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford University, recalled Mr. Dellinger’s fondness for a poem by Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser,” that is engraved in the subway station she used when she would visit him in Washington. The poem is about Whitman’s time as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. “I always thought of Walter as trying to dress the American wound of race,” she said. “He was in there to heal the world.”Poetry was only one art form that moved him. He followed the television series “Mad Men” closely enough to post lengthy late-night comments to online forums about the show. One of his comments led to a round table discussion, hosted by The Wall Street Journal, in which Mr. Dellinger first explained his affection for “Mad Men,” and then — ever the lawyer — pointed out that a chronological gap between seasons had skipped completely over two major national events: the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that year’s brutal murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi.In 1988, Mr. Dellinger was selected to be a fellow at the National Humanities Center, along with Rita Dove, who would later be named U.S. poet laureate. “I remember being so impressed at how authentic he was; a Southerner deeply committed to civil rights,” Ms. Dove told me. “He was always a straight shooter, but his humor was the humor of the blues. You laughed to keep from crying.”Although I was never Mr. Dellinger’s student, I felt as though I earned an honorary degree through our countless email exchanges and hours of phone calls over the years. What struck me in every exchange was his love — unabashed and not at all possessive — of the ideals underlying American democracy. He held neither jealousy of those who knew more than he did nor disdain for those, like me, who knew far less.I called him recently for a piece I was writing on the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. There is a long-running and legally complex dispute over whether the amendment should already be considered part of the Constitution. I found myself torn, but Mr. Dellinger didn’t. His take was, as always, informed by both deep legal training and good common sense. “The tiebreaker for me is the difficulty of amending the Constitution. There are so many ways of making the process harder. My point is, it’s goddamn hard enough.”There is never a good time to lose someone like Walter Dellinger. It is especially gutting right now, as a turbocharged right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court gears up to obliterate decades of precedent that had pointed the way, however imperfectly, toward a fairer, more equal and more inclusive America. But Mr. Dellinger, a fierce liberal who spent much of his life deep in the former confederacy, was always keenly aware of the forces he was up against. Thankfully he trained a generation of lawyers to think, and to fight, the way he did.