During our conversation in the elegant dining room of the Hay-Adams Hotel, the source of our difference became clear. It was a matter of baseline. The baseline against which I was measuring the court was the devastation that most liberals had been expecting given that appointees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush now made up a majority of the justices. For Judge Reinhardt, the baseline was the court’s liberal golden era under Chief Justice Earl Warren. And from his perspective, he was completely right.

In the spring of 1992, there was no one left on the court who sought to harness the Constitution as an engine of social progress. To Judge Reinhardt, that was the law’s highest, if not its only, purpose. What I in my journalistic capacity saw as fact, he saw as tragedy.

At his death at age 87, Judge Reinhardt was the last of the 56 Court of Appeals judges appointed by President Jimmy Carter who was still in active service. Although President Carter never had a chance to name a Supreme Court justice, he had a transformative effect on the federal judiciary. During his single term, he was able to take full advantage of the creation by Congress of 152 new judgeships — a 30 percent expansion of the federal bench. The 41 women among his 262 judicial appointments amounted to five times the number of women who by then had ever been named to a federal court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a Carter appointee to the federal appeals court in Washington. So was Patricia Wald, the first woman to become chief judge of that important court. Despite the crises that plagued the Carter years, for the courts, it was an expansive and progressive era.

That was the world that Stephen Reinhardt watched disappearing. Above, I described his project as maintaining access to habeas corpus. Actually, it was bigger than that. It was calling out the Supreme Court’s failings as he saw them. It was to make a record. Why bother? In his long life, Judge Reinhardt saw the pendulum swing more than once. He believed it would swing again, and when it did, the record would be there for reference.

He was an optimist, he said in his 2015 article on habeas corpus. “I see a trend toward progress and social justice, sometimes after painful battles and sometimes after painful lapses or even painful defeats,” he wrote. “Yet this is a nation that in most respects continues to improve its democracy, sometimes dragging the Supreme Court with it and sometimes being dragged in that direction by its judiciary. I would hope that some of the recent errors the court has made will be corrected as the arc of history unfolds.”

His final opinion was in fact a corrective — not of the Supreme Court, but of his own court. On Monday, the Ninth Circuit released an important opinion he completed before his death. The decision, Rizo v. Yovino, interpreted the federal Equal Pay Act to prohibit basing a new employee’s starting salary on the previous job’s final salary. That common practice is widely viewed as disadvantaging women; in Judge Reinhardt’s words, it “simply perpetuates the past pervasive discrimination that the Equal Pay Act seeks to eradicate.” A 1982 Ninth Circuit decision had interpreted the Equal Pay Act as not barring the practice. Since a three-judge panel can’t overturn a circuit court’s precedent, an 11-judge panel heard this case. All 11 judges agreed on rejecting the precedent, although five took issue with aspects of Judge Reinhardt’s statutory analysis.