“It was only later that we both learned that we thought it easy for opposite reasons.”Justice Stevens was known around the court for treating others with sensitivity and respect.
“I know that I, like most of my colleagues, have continued to participate in a learning process while serving on the bench,” he said in 2005 at a symposium held at Fordham University Law School to mark his 30th anniversary on the court and 35th year as a judge.Professor William D. Popkin of the Indiana University School of Law wrote in a 1989 article in The Duke Law Journal that “a special brand of judicial restraint and creativity” marked Justice Stevens’s approach to the law. “The arrogance of this assumption of power takes one’s breath away,” Justice Scalia wrote.A Supreme Court clerkship was a natural sequel. Stevens won high praise for his efforts and said later that he had learned invaluable lessons about how appellate courts work. “I told John,” Mr. Percy later recalled, “if you wait six years, I may not be senator and there may not be a Republican president.
Justice Stevens was guided by three principles, Professor Popkin wrote: first, “deference to other decision makers,” based on the view that “the court should not decide cases that other institutions can decide at least as well or better”; second, attention to the facts of a case and avoidance of broad generalizations, based on the view that “the court should decide no more than the facts of the case require”; and third, the belief that the court’s highest substantive goal was to “protect individual dignity,” as reflected in his approach to equal protection.Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that case provided an example of how deeply divided the court was during those years on both methodology and outcomes. The episode became the subject of a book, “Illinois Justice,” by Kenneth A. Manaster, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.“What once was a courageous act of defiant expression is now perfectly lawful,” he noted, “and therefore is not worth the effort.”He said that although the actual winner of the presidential election might remain unknown, “the identity of the loser is perfectly clear”: It was “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart were among the many celebrities whom the young John Paul Stevens met at the hotel. He graduated in 1941 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and winner of the university’s highest honors for scholarship and student activities.He is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth Jane Sesemann and Susan Roberta Mullen; nine grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.The court set up a special commission to investigate the charge, with Mr. Stevens as its counsel. He assigned opinions to others in favor of gay rights and affirmative action and kept for himself decisions that upheld the authority of the federal government in the face of what had appeared to be the unstoppable states’-rights tilt of the Rehnquist court’s federalism revolution.But while believing that judicial deference was often appropriate, he also believed that the federal courts must be available when other institutions of government failed to do their jobs.
Decades later, in writing the court’s opinion that gave the Guantánamo detainees access to federal court, Justice Stevens took great pleasure in vindicating the position his old boss had taken in Ahrens v. Clark. But it was impelled by his deep, visceral reaction to what the majority did in Citizens United.Mr.
During this time, the subcommittee worked on several highly publicized investigation concerns in many industries, most notably Major League Baseball.