In an interview yesterday, Summers reaffirmed his commitment to affirmative action policies, although he declined to say whether Harvard would likely file a brief in the event of an appeal.

“I’m entirely comfortable with Harvard’s policy and Harvard’s rationale for that policy,” he said.

Indirectly, Harvard admissions policies played a part in both the circuit court decision on Tuesday and the 1978 Supreme Court case to which it referred, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which prohibited the use of quotas to achieve diversity but said race could be one criterion for admissions decisions.

Harvard’s methods for increasing diversity figured into the 1978 Bakke case as a model plan cited by Justice Lewis F. Powell in his concurring opinion.

The majority decision in the Michigan case, which is called Grutter v. Bollinger, referred to Powell’s discussion of the “Harvard plan,” which Powell said was legal because the University used race in admissions only in order to make its student body more diverse.

The majority opinion in the Michigan case compared the University of Michigan law school’s admission system to Harvard’s methodology as it operated in 1978.

“We find that the Law School’s consideration of race and ethnicity is virtually indistinguishable from the Harvard plan Justice Powell approved in Bakke,” the decision read.

But one of Tuesday’s dissenting opinions argued the 1978 case only referred to Harvard’s plan and did not actually rule on the legality of affirmative action policies at Harvard.

That opinion went on to compare Michigan’s system to Harvard’s “religious-conscious” admissions policies under former University President A. Lawrence Lowell in the early 20th century, which gave “preference in admissions to Gentiles as opposed to Jews…to produce a mixture of students in the school that was closer to the proportion that prevailed in society.”

Another case, concerning affirmative action in selecting University of Michigan’s undergraduate student population, is also pending decision by the appeals court.

—David H. Gellis contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.