Stevens, John Paul

views updated May 18 2018

STEVENS, JOHN PAUL

A member of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1975, John Paul Stevens has developed a reputation as a judicial centrist on the High Court, although many of his more well-known opinions are marked by a liberal bent.

Born on April 20, 1920, Stevens descended from Nicholas Stevens, who emigrated to America in 1659 after serving as a brigadier general in Oliver Cromwell's army. Stevens's father was a businessman and lawyer; he designed Chicago's Stevens Hotel and was its original managing director.

A political moderate during his college days at the University of Chicago, Stevens graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1941. During world war ii he served with the U.S. Navy and was awarded the Bronze Star. After the war he studied law at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, graduating first in his class in 1947.

Stevens began his legal career as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice wiley b. rutledge. In 1948 he joined the Chicago firm of Poppenhausen, Johnston, Thompson, and Raymond, specializing in litigation and antitrust law. In 1951 he served as associate counsel on a study of monopoly power for a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. Upon returning to Chicago in 1952, Stevens founded the firm of Rothschild, Stevens, Barry, and Meyers. Along with his private practice, he taught antitrust law at the Northwestern University and the University of Chicago law schools throughout much of the 1950s. He also served for a time as a member of the U.S. attorney general's National Committee to Study Antitrust Laws.

In 1970 President richard m. nixon appointed Stevens as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He became known for his scholarly abilities and his carefully written, clear, and succinct opinions. His first opinion on the court of appeals was a dissent in a challenge to the summary incarceration of an antiwar activist who had disrupted a legislative session (Groppi v. Leslie, 436 F.2d 331 [1971]). Stevens viewed the incarceration as unconstitutional, and the following year his minority view was vindicated by a unanimous Supreme Court (404 U.S. 496, 92 S. Ct. 582, 30 L. Ed. 2d 632).

The liberal Supreme Court justice william o. douglas retired in 1975, providing President gerald r. ford his only opportunity to make a Supreme Court appointment. Stevens received high praise and active support from Ford's attorney general, edward levi, and unqualified support from the american bar association. During the Senate confirmation hearing, Stevens remarked that he believed that litigants should know how judges viewed the arguments and that it was important to make a record to note diverse views for reference in later cases.

Stevens was unanimously confirmed on December 17, 1975, and took his oath of office two days later.

Until Stevens became a justice, new justices were typically seen but not heard. Instead, they usually joined dissents or concurrences without offering their own opinions. Stevens did not fit that pattern. During the 1976–77 term, Stevens had seventeen separate majority concurrences and twenty-seven separate dissents, far more than any other justice.

"It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written."
John Paul Stevens

From the start, Stevens evinced a concern that the legal system give particular care to ensure the rights of the underprivileged, including aliens, illegitimate children, and prisoners. However, Stevens cannot easily be classified as either a judicial liberal or a conservative. In a judicial context, a conservative judge generally will not decide issues that he or she believes are within the province of legislatures. Moreover, a conservative typically votes to enhance government power in a conflict between government interests and individual rights. A judicial liberal, on the other hand, tends to favor individual interests and will look beyond the bounds of a statute and past interpretations of the Constitution to decide social policy questions.

For example, although Stevens is generally perceived as being sympathetic to the rights of prisoners, his sympathy has not necessarily translated into leniency for criminal defendants. Stevens wrote the opinion in United States v. Ross, 456 U.S. 798, 102 S. Ct. 2157, 72 L. Ed. 2d 572 (1982), wherein the Court held that police may search compartments and containers within a vehicle even though the contents are not in plain view, as long as the search is based on probable cause. Probable cause, the same standard needed to obtain a search warrant, is typically determined by a magistrate, but this case effectively gave that power to the police in searches of vehicle containers.

Stevens's nomination was opposed by some women's groups that claimed that he was unresponsive in several sexual discrimination cases while on the court of appeals. In 1981 he voted to uphold the all-male draft (rostker v. goldberg, 453 U.S. 57, 101 S. Ct. 2646, 69 L. Ed. 2d 478), and in another case he declined to consider the theory of comparable worth. On the other hand, he has typically voted to uphold roe v. wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973), and limit restrictions to a woman's right to abortion (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 510 U.S. 1309, 114 S. Ct. 909, 127 L. Ed. 2d 352 [1994] and Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173, 111 S. Ct. 1759, 114 L. Ed. 2d 233 [1991]). In Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 117 S. Ct. 1636, 137 L. Ed. 2d 945 (1997), Stevens spoke for a unanimous Court in allowing a sexual harassment lawsuit against President bill clinton to go forward. Stevens ruled that the Constitution does not afford a president temporary immunity—except in the most exceptional circumstances—for civil litigation arising from events that occurred before the president took office. The Court also held that Clinton was not entitled to a stay of proceedings during his term in office.

One of Stevens's earliest opinions was Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U.S. 50, 96 S. Ct. 2440, 49 L. Ed. 2d 310, (1976). He wrote for a plurality of the Court, upholding Detroit zoning ordinances that prevented the concentration of "adult" establishments. The case was significant because the ordinance in question did not require a finding that the establishment dealt in legally obscene materials as a prerequisite to legal action. Before the ruling in Young, sexually-oriented material that was not legally obscene appeared to be entitled to complete first amendment protection. Stevens wrote that the material in question was so sexually explicit as to be entitled to less protection than other speech, stating that "few of us would march our sons and daughters off to war to preserve the citizen's right to see 'Specified Sexual Activities' exhibited in the theaters of our choice." He reasoned that the zoning restriction

did not totally prohibit the availability of the material and was a reasonable action by the city to further its interest in preserving the quality of urban life. This ruling has been the basis for other restrictions that fall short of an outright prohibition of communication that is sexually explicit but not obscene.

Justice Stevens, along with Justices potter stewart and lewis f. powell jr., acted as a swing vote in a series of death penalty cases in the mid-1970s. The Court upheld death penalty statutes providing for discretion in imposition but overturned those calling for mandatory death sentences. Stevens voted against the death penalty in cases of rape and dissented from a 1989 decision permitting an execution for someone who committed a murder at age sixteen or seventeen.

In Eichman v. United States, 496 U.S. 310, 110 S. Ct. 2404, 110 L. Ed. 2d 287 (1990), the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning was a form of expression protected by the First Amendment and overturned a federal statute that attempted to protect flags. The majority ruled that the statute had to withstand the most exacting scrutiny and could not be upheld under the First Amendment. Stevens wrote a dissent joined by conservative Chief Justice william h. rehnquist and two other justices, maintaining that the statute was consistent with the First Amendment.

Stevens wrote the opinion in BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, 517 U.S. 559, 116 S. Ct. 1589, 134 L. Ed. 2d 809 (1996), the first case in which the High Court overturned a jury's punitive damages award. A jury awarded an automobile owner $4 million (later reduced to $2 million) when the manufacturer failed to disclose a refinished paint job on a new BMW. Stevens called the award "grossly excessive" and set out criteria to determine the propriety of punitive damage awards. The four dissenting justices in the case argued that the ruling improperly intruded into states' prerogatives.

In 1992 Stevens wrote the opinion for cipollone v. liggett group, inc., 505 U.S. 504, 112 S. Ct. 2608, 120 L. Ed. 2d 407 (1992), possibly exposing the tobacco industry to huge adverse verdicts for money damages by opening the door to increased litigation for smoking-related deaths. In a 7–2 decision, the Court ruled that cigarette manufacturers that lie about the dangers of smoking or otherwise misrepresent their products can be sued under state laws. Because cigarette labeling is governed by federal law, at issue was whether federal law preempts state common-law liability lawsuits. The Court ruled that federal suits are the only avenue for pursuing failure-to-warn cases or claims of omissions in the manufacturer's advertising or promotions. Litigants may sue in state court, however, for claims of breaches of express warranties, claims that cigarette advertisements are fraudulent, and claims that a company hid the dangers of smoking from state authorities or conspired to mislead smokers.

Stevens also authored wallace v. jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 105 S. Ct. 2479, 86 L. Ed. 2d 29 (1985), holding that a state cannot provide a moment of silence at the beginning of the school day for the express purpose of facilitating meditation or prayer. The Court held that the Alabama statute in question did not pass constitutional scrutiny.

Recent Decisions

Over the last eight years, Stevens's opinions have continued to cross the political spectrum, despite the tendency for observers to cast him as one of the "liberal" justices. In Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 122 S. Ct. 2508, 153 L. Ed. 2d 666 (2002), Stevens wrote a 6–3 majority opinion ruling that a prison inmate had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth amendment when prison guards handcuffed him to a hitching post as punishment for disruptive behavior, even though the inmate had already been subdued. Stevens said that the prison guards knowingly subjected the inmate to a substantial risk of physical harm, to unnecessary pain caused by the handcuffs, to unnecessary exposure to the heat of the sun, to prolonged thirst and taunting, and to a deprivation of bathroom breaks that created a risk of particular discomfort and humiliation.

That same year Stevens also wrote a 6–3 majority opinion ruling that the execution of mentally retarded criminals violates the Eighth Amendment's guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. atkins v. virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 122 S. Ct. 2242, 153 L. Ed. 2d 335 (2002). Citing "evolving standards of decency," Stevens said that his decision was informed by the consensus reflected in deliberations of the American public, legislators, scholars, and judges that have taken place over the thirteen years since Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 109 S. Ct. 2934, 106 L. Ed. 2d 256 (1989). In Penry, the Supreme Court held that two state statutes prohibiting the execution of the mentally retarded, even when added to the fourteen states that had rejected capital punishment completely, did not provide sufficient evidence of a national consensus. In Atkins, though, Stevens emphasized that sixteen additional states had passed laws barring execution of the mentally retarded since the Penry decision was handed down.

Stevens surprised many observers with his dissenting opinion in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 121 S. Ct. 2038, 150 L. Ed. 2d 94 (2001), where five justices found that the use of a thermal-imaging device aimed at a private home from a public street to detect relative amounts of heat within the home constituted a "search" within the meaning of the fourth amendment, and thus the use of that device was presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Justice Stevens argued that thermal imaging did not constitute a Fourth Amendment search because it detected only heat radiating from the external surface of the house.

Stevens surprised no one with his dissenting opinion in bush v. gore, 531 U.S. 98, 121 S. Ct. 525, 148 L. Ed. 2d 388 (2000), however, where seven justices concluded that the process devised by the Florida Supreme Court to recount the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Only five justices agreed that there was insufficient time to fashion a remedy that would fairly and lawfully allow the votes of Florida residents to be accurately counted for either presidential candidate. As a result, the nation's high court effectively ordered the Florida recount to stop, which meant that george w. bush would become the forty-third president of the United States.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens argued that the Equal Protection Clause does not limit the states' power to design their electoral processes—including substantive standards for determining whether a vote had been legally cast. Consequently, Stevens believed that the U.S. Supreme Court should have deferred to the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of those standards and allowed the recount to continue. Under the majority's own reasoning, Stevens wrote, the appropriate course of action would have been to remand the case so the Florida high court could establish more specific procedures for implementing the legislature's uniform general standard of "voter intent." But in "the interest of finality," Stevens continued, "the majority effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent—and are therefore legal votes under state law—but were for some reason rejected by ballot-counting machines."

further readings

Jost, Kenneth. 1996. The Supreme Court Yearbook 1995–96. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly.

Manaster, Kenneth A. 2001. Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Sickels, Robert J. 1988. John Paul Stevens and the Constitution: The Search for Balance. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.

John Paul Stevens

views updated May 09 2018

John Paul Stevens

John Paul Stevens (born 1920), appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon in 1975, became a member of the "liberal" voting group on the Court which included Justices William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.

Illinois native John Paul Stevens was a Phi Beta Kappa first-in-his-class University of Chicago magna cum laude graduate and law review graduate of Northwestern University. He clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Wiley B. Rutledge 1947-1948. He was serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit when President Ford selected him in 1975 as his sole appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was speedily confirmed 98 to 0.

On the Court, Justice Stevens—its junior justice for almost six years until Justice Sandra Day O'Connor replaced Justice Stewart in late 1981—confounded prognosticators who thought they knew him as well as those who did not. Widely considered a "sure swing vote" in the Court's center, then generally composed of Justices White and Stewart, often joined by Justice Powell and occasionally by Justice Blackmun, he soon proved to be found far more frequently with the "liberal bloc" of Justices Brennan and Marshall, and increasingly so with the passing of time.

Stevens was not as doctrinaire as the other two liberals in all facets of civil rights and liberties, and he resolutely parted company with them on such high visibility issues as "reverse discrimination." Nevertheless his "pro rights" or "pro individual" score was consistently high, exceeded only by his two libertarian brethren and by Justice Blackmun in racial discrimination litigation. The women's rights group which opposed his nomination because of his alleged "blatant insensitivity" to sex discrimination quickly began to hail him as both sensitive and free of preconceived notions. Voting rights, free speech, free exercise of religion, separation of church and state, civil rights for African-Americans, children, and prisoners, and not excluding the criminal justice sector—the Stevens' record in all of these areas drew praise from liberal constituencies.

A "gadfly to the brethren," a personal loner, a legal maverick, he consistently challenged his colleagues. Always well-prepared and soft-spoken in his frequent colloquies with counsel in oral argument, he probed like a veritable explorer and was replete with novel legal theories. The latter was particularly notable in cases involving constitutional interpretation, where his jurisprudence permitted him a great deal more latitude than in statutory construction problems. A student of history, and beholden to the tenets of stare decisis he nonetheless recognized the importance of the moving finger of time—or, as Justice Oliver W. Holmes expressed it, he "felt necessities of the time." Yet, as he demonstrated so fervently in such stream-of-consciousness cases as Bakke, he did not ignore legislative language or clear legislative intent in favor of judicial fiat.

Although respectful and courteous, Stevens found it difficult to subsume his own ideas and interpretations to others in order to forge a numerically united front. This was in part because he wrote more dissenting and concurring opinions than any of his colleagues while lamenting the plethora of opinions handed down by the Court and the cascading number of cases accepted for review! He disagreed with the majority in fully 50 of 91 divided opinions in the 1983-1984 term. To dissent, of course, is one thing; but to engage in a flood of concurring opinions is quite another—for they all-too-often muddied the constitutional law waters and laid themselves open to the charge that they were ego trips.

Stevens found it extremely difficult to join a majority or dissenting opinion without some comment. Thus, in the delicate and difficult July 1983 holding in Barefoot v. Estelle, in which a badly divided Court upheld the expedited handling of a death row case, Stevens dissented from Justice White's controlling opinion on the procedural issue; but he then concurred in the majority's sanction of the prosecution's use of psychiatric testimony—thereby casting the Court's vote into a 5:3 equation. And early in 1984 he deemed it necessary not only to be the sole dissenter in an "original jurisdiction" jurisdictional case dispute, but he also filed a partial concurrence. That he was not the only justice to engage in that type of perfectionism does not gainsay the unfortunate effect it had upon the judicial process, let alone the public's comprehension.

In 1992, Stevens wrote the opinion for Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., in which the Court, by a 7-2 vote, ruled that cigarette manufacturers could be sued under state products liability laws, particularly those grounded in charges of fraud or misrepresentation about the dangers of cigarette smoking. A rash of lawsuits broke out country-wide. In March, 1997, the Liggett Group announced a sweeping settlement in 22 states that were suing the tobacco industry to recover Medicaid costs. This followed a public admission by Liggett officials that tobacco is addictive and causes cancer and heart disease.

If Stevens was not a jurisprudential or tactical on-bench leader, he was nonetheless an unceasing stimulator of reflection, of innovation, of disciplined literateness (witness his majority opinion for the 5:4 Court in the 1984 "Home Video Taping" case), and of cerebral combat in constitutional law logic and theory. His gift for elegant, pungent expression will grace the Court's annals.

Further Reading

The literature on Justice Stevens was sparse. A commendable early appraisal was Leonard Orland's "John Paul Stevens" in Leon Friedman (editor), The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789-1978 (1980). Justice Stevens' opinions— several of which were mentioned in this article—represented a good measure of his jurisprudence. In general, see Henry J. Abraham, Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (1985). □

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