Justice Stevens to Retire After 34 Years/The End of an Era, for Court and Nation

Justice Stevens to Retire After 34 Years
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/us/politics/10stevens.html?hp


WASHINGTON — Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, leader of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, announced on Friday that he would retire at the end of this term, setting up a confirmation battle over his replacement that is sure to dominate the political scene this summer.

In a brief letter to President Obama, whom he addressed as “my dear Mr. President,” Justice Stevens said he was announcing his retirement now because he had “concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court’s next term” in October.

A representative from the Supreme Court delivered the letter to the White House at 10:30 a.m., a White House official said. Fifteen minutes later, Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, informed the president by telephone.

The retirement by Justice Stevens, 89, had been widely expected, because he did not hire the usual number of clerks for next year’s term.

The White House has been quietly evaluating potential nominees for months. Among those rumored to be in contention for the nomination are Solicitor General Elena Kagan and several appeals court judges, including Diane Wood and Merrick Garland.

A soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, Justice Stevens has led liberals on a court that has become increasingly conservative. He was appointed by President Gerald Ford in December 1975 to succeed Justice William O. Douglas, who had retired the month before. He is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade.

Before joining the Supreme Court in late 1975, Justice Stevens had been an appeals court judge. He served in the Navy in World War II.

He joined the court when it included Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr., who along with Justice Douglas had been liberal stalwarts of the Warren court era. Also serving were Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee who voted with the court’s conservatives on criminal justice issues but was a strong supporter of abortion rights, and Potter Stewart, the last of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s four Supreme Court appointees, who, like Justice Stevens, was a moderate Republican from the Midwest.

For most of his first two decades on the court, Justice Stevens labored in the shadows of those large figures, and was known to the public, if at all, mainly for the jaunty bow ties that were his sartorial trademark. After 1994, though, when the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun made Justice Stevens the court’s senior associate, the language of his dissents started to become noticeably sharper, with a theme running through them: that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play.

Confronted with a court far more conservative than the one he joined, Justice Stevens showed the world what his colleagues already knew: that beneath his amiable manner lay a canny strategist and master tactician, qualities he used to win victories that a simple liberal-conservative head count would appear to be impossible. A frequent dissenter even in his early years on the court, he now wrote more blunt and passionate opinions, explaining on several occasions that the nation was best served by an open airing of disagreements.

Justice Stevens’s stature as the bench’s unlikely liberal voice grew greater as the Bush administration’s policies on terrorism and detainees translated into a string of cases that came before the court, and as the court itself moved further to the right, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. succeeded Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in 2005 and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the place of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor the following year. Though he now found himself more often in the minority than any of his colleagues, Justice Stevens nevertheless helped shape the majority for a number of important decisions.

Justice Stevens’s plainspoken style has characterized the last years of his tenure. In cases involving prisoners held without charge at the naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the mentally retarded on death row, his version of American justice propelled by common sense and moral clarity commanded a majority.

In perhaps the most significant case, Hamdan. v. Rumseld, he repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo on trial by military commissions. He concluded his 72-page majority opinion with the blunt statement that “the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.”


The End of an Era, for Court and Nation
By ADAM LIPTAK
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/us/politics/10judge.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Supreme Court on Friday after 34 years, may be the last justice from a time when ability and independence, rather than perceived ideology, were viewed as the crucial qualifications for a seat on the court. He was nominated in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, who said all he wanted was “the finest legal mind I could find.”

Justice Stevens was confirmed 19 days after his nomination. Though Roe v. Wade had been decided two years earlier, he was asked no questions about the decision, which identified a constitutional right to abortion. His confirmation hearings were the last not to be broadcast live on television.

Justice Stevens, a Republican, gradually became the leader of the court’s liberal wing, and his majority opinions limited the use of the death penalty and expanded the rights of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Over time, he became increasingly skeptical of claims of government power, and he often voted in favor of criminal defendants, prisoners and people claiming to have been subjected to unlawful discrimination.

The conventional view is that his leftward drift was a bitter disappointment to his sponsors. Mr. Ford had certainly cared about judicial ideology: As a congressman in 1970, he led the failed attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas for being too liberal, saying he had endorsed “hippie-yippie-style revolution.”

But Mr. Ford remained a fan of Justice Stevens.

“I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination 30 years ago of John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Mr. Ford wrote in 2005.

There is some truth, backed by evidence in the political science literature, that Justice Stevens moved to the left over time. But there is also support for his view that it was the court that moved to the right.

In an interview last week, he said that every one of the dozen justices appointed to the court since 1971, including himself, was more conservative than his or her predecessor.

“We’ll wait and see to see if the most recent change fits that,” he said of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court last year. “But prior to Sonia’s joining the court that was true with the possible exception of Ruth Ginsburg.”

Justice Stevens’s retirement gives President Obama a second opportunity to name a justice, and it means the nation is likely to see a confirmation battle for the second summer in a row.

If Mr. Obama chooses another liberal, it will not alter the fundamental ideological balance on the court. Nonetheless, the loss of Justice Stevens’s personal charm, canny tactics and institutional memory can only leave the court’s more liberal wing in a weakened position.

Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 on April 20, is the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court by more than a decade. He became the senior justice in 1994 with the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun.

That position matters. When the chief justice is not in the majority, the senior justice in the majority is given the power to assign the majority opinion. For the last decade and a half, that justice has almost always been Justice Stevens, and he has used that power with patience and skill to forge and maintain alliances in major liberal victories, often locking in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s swing vote by assigning the opinion to him.

Justice Stevens has played a significant and often behind-the-scenes role in cases involving affirmative action, abortion rights and executive power. He grew disillusioned with the death penalty over the years, announcing in 2008 his conclusion that it violated the Eighth Amendment. But he went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”

And he wrote major dissents in two of the court’s most hard-fought recent 5-to-4 decisions, one ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns, the other that corporations may spend freely in candidate elections. In that second case, Citizens United, Justice Stevens for the first time showed his age on the bench, stumbling a bit as he read a 20-minute dissent.

But for all his influence, he was never well known to the public. When Americans are asked to name members of the Supreme Court in public opinion surveys, his name is routinely the least likely to be mentioned.

Justice Stevens was born to a prominent Chicago family that operated what was then the largest hotel in the world, the Stevens Hotel, with 3,000 rooms. During the Depression, the family struggled to stay afloat, and his father, Ernest Stevens, was charged with embezzling from the family’s insurance business.

He was convicted in 1933, but the conviction was overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court the next year. The wrenching experience informed the young John Stevens’s thinking about criminal law, and he has been alert in his decisions to the possibility of prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions.

Mr. Stevens attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University School of Law. In between, he served in the Navy in World War II, signing up on Dec. 6, 1941. “I’m sure you know how the enemy responded the following day,” he likes to say, referring to the Pearl Harbor attack. He earned a Bronze Star for his work as a code-breaker.

After law school, he served as a clerk to Justice Wiley B. Rutledge Jr., the last of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointees. Turning down an offer to teach at Yale Law School, Mr. Stevens returned to Chicago to practice law, specializing in antitrust cases. His career in private practice was punctuated by stints in government service, including as counsel to a special commission of the Illinois Supreme Court that led to the resignations of two State Supreme Court justices.

President Richard M. Nixon appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, in 1970.