NY Times profiles Justice John Paul Stevens

A fantastic piece covering Justice Stevens in the Sunday Magazine. He's presented as a much more balanced character than some right/left pundits may have you think. The internal politics of the Supreme Court are always interesting. The article highlights, his important role as senior associate justice in assigning opinions (when not agreeing with the Chief).

The author notes the shift in mentality of liberal judges these days:

"Judicial liberalism... has largely become a conservative project: an effort to preserve the legal status quo in the face of efforts by a younger generation of conservatives to uproot the precedents of the past 40 years."

Interestingly, the article mentions the role of his own father's conviction for embezzlement, his own World War II experience, and his experiences clerking in forming his more expansive protections of individual liberty from government interference.

Also includes discussion of Roe v Wade, affirmative action, his role in Bill Clinton's impeachment saga, and finally a mention of his reasoning in Bush v Gore.


For fans of constitutional interpretation, here's his view:
Stevens’s final judicial theme is that the court has an obligation to protect ideals of equality and liberty in light of the nation’s entire history, rather than legalistically parsing the original understanding of the Constitution. As the court moved right during the past 20 years, Stevens increasingly saw it as his role to interpret the Constitution with fidelity to all of American history, rejecting the claim of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and Judge Robert Bork that the original understanding of the 18th-century framers is all that matters...“Originalism is perfectly sensible. I always try to figure out what the original intent was, but to say that’s the Bible and nothing else counts seems to me quite wrong.”

Finally, I like this quote:

Though no one has succeeded in reducing his vision to a simple label — “I like to have people think I’m a good lawyer, to tell you the truth,” Stevens said. “I’m not big on labels” — his legal thinking has returned repeatedly over the years to a set of identifiable ideas and themes.

The first is that the government has a duty to behave impartially, rather than favoring one group over another for partisan or sectarian reasons. “It seems to me that one of the overriding principles in running the country is the government ought to be neutral,” Stevens told me. “It has a very strong obligation to be impartial, and not use its power to advance political agendas or personal agendas.”