National Kato
04-09-2010, 11:44 AM
The Supreme Court's oldest member, Justice John Paul Stevens, has announced he is retiring this summer (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-SupremeCourt-Stev.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss). His retirement has been previously hinted at and this announcement comes 11 days prior to his 90th birthday.
President Obama's now has his second Supreme Court seat to fill.
Jeffrey Toobin, lawyer, author, and legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker, weighs in (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?printable=true):Stevens is an unlikely liberal icon. When he was appointed, he told me recently, he thought of himself as a Republican and always had—“ever since my father voted for Coolidge and Harding.” He declined to say whether he still does. For many decades, there have been moderate Republicans on the Court—John M. Harlan II and Potter Stewart (appointed by Eisenhower), Lewis F. Powell and Harry Blackmun (Nixon), David H. Souter (Bush I). Stevens is the last of them, and his departure will mark a cultural milestone. The moderate-Republican tradition that he came out of “goes way back,” Stevens said. “But things have changed.”
So has Stevens. His positions have evolved on such issues as civil rights and the death penalty, and he has led the Court’s counteroffensive against the Bush Administration’s treatment of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. And, as Stevens’s profile has risen, and his views have moved left, so, too, has criticism of him from conservatives reached a higher pitch. “From the beginning of his time as a Justice, you could see Stevens’s roots in the New Deal Court and his willingness to justify an expanding welfare state,” Richard Epstein, a libertarian-leaning law professor at New York University, said. “On these issues, he’s been consistent and consistently wrong about everything—and highly influential.”
Still, Stevens’s views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy. Many great judicial legacies have a deep theoretical foundation—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s skeptical pragmatism, William J. Brennan’s aggressive liberalism, Scalia’s insistent originalism. Stevens’s lack of one raises questions about the durability of his influence on the Court.
But, more than anything, his career shows how the Court has become a partisan battlefield. In that spirit, Roberts last week denounced President Obama’s criticism of the Court in his State of the Union address, saying that the occasion had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” When Stevens leaves, the Supreme Court will be just another place where Democrats and Republicans fight.
President Obama's now has his second Supreme Court seat to fill.
Jeffrey Toobin, lawyer, author, and legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker, weighs in (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?printable=true):Stevens is an unlikely liberal icon. When he was appointed, he told me recently, he thought of himself as a Republican and always had—“ever since my father voted for Coolidge and Harding.” He declined to say whether he still does. For many decades, there have been moderate Republicans on the Court—John M. Harlan II and Potter Stewart (appointed by Eisenhower), Lewis F. Powell and Harry Blackmun (Nixon), David H. Souter (Bush I). Stevens is the last of them, and his departure will mark a cultural milestone. The moderate-Republican tradition that he came out of “goes way back,” Stevens said. “But things have changed.”
So has Stevens. His positions have evolved on such issues as civil rights and the death penalty, and he has led the Court’s counteroffensive against the Bush Administration’s treatment of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. And, as Stevens’s profile has risen, and his views have moved left, so, too, has criticism of him from conservatives reached a higher pitch. “From the beginning of his time as a Justice, you could see Stevens’s roots in the New Deal Court and his willingness to justify an expanding welfare state,” Richard Epstein, a libertarian-leaning law professor at New York University, said. “On these issues, he’s been consistent and consistently wrong about everything—and highly influential.”
Still, Stevens’s views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy. Many great judicial legacies have a deep theoretical foundation—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s skeptical pragmatism, William J. Brennan’s aggressive liberalism, Scalia’s insistent originalism. Stevens’s lack of one raises questions about the durability of his influence on the Court.
But, more than anything, his career shows how the Court has become a partisan battlefield. In that spirit, Roberts last week denounced President Obama’s criticism of the Court in his State of the Union address, saying that the occasion had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” When Stevens leaves, the Supreme Court will be just another place where Democrats and Republicans fight.