Nov 4, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS John Paul Stevens
Little Brown
ISBN 978-0316199803
292 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Dahlia Lithwick
Stevens does get his licks in. Framing his memoir as a report card on the five chief justices with whom he's had personal experience (Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist and John Roberts), he manages the occasional gentle sideswipe. But even these come across as mild asides rather than personal attacks. Stevens writes critically of Rehnquist's decision to add gold stripes to his robe and his similarly "ostentatious" judicial opinions on state sovereignty. He confesses that both he and Justice Stephen Breyer were persuaded that George W. Bush's petition to the Supreme Court to halt the Florida recount in 2000 was "frivolous." And he echoes the well-known observation that Warren Burger's haphazard vote-counting and opinion assignments were problematic and inefficient. But almost every new character in Stevens' telling is first and foremost a good guy and only later a political actor. "As a Republican I was not a special admirer of Truman," he writes of first meeting the president in 1948. "But I still vividly remember the favorable impression that he made when he greeted me in the receiving line. He was a genuine, friendly guy whom I liked right away."
It is not without consequence that throughout this book Stevens refers to his colleagues as "Nino" and "Sandra" and "Thurgood" and "Clarence." Nor can the reader fail to notice that Stevens - the last veteran on the court - often describes his colleagues' military service in introducing them. (Byron White, who clerked for Vinson before joining the court, is depicted as a "World War II Navy intelligence officer who survived kamikaze attacks in the Pacific.") In one way or another, Stevens finds a shared passion - social, military, or just by way of tennis or piloting small aircraft - with everyone at the court, as a way of explaining that at a court this intimately connected, the commonalities will always outweigh the differences.
Stevens doesn't mince words when he criticizes the logic animating cases with which he disagrees. He's not a fan of Bush v. Gore, the Citizens United campaign finance decision, or the court's death-penalty jurisprudence. He hasn't much regard for what he describes as Antonin Scalia's "historical forays." Stevens also writes, carefully, of the seismic change that occurred at the court with the retirement of Thurgood Marshall and his replacement by Clarence Thomas, concluding gently that "while Thurgood's jurisprudence reflected an understanding that the Constitution was drafted 'to form a more perfect union' - and thus to accommodate unforeseen changes in society - Justice Thomas' repeated emphasis on historical analysis seems to assume that we should view the Union as perfect at the beginning." All of which makes Stevens' deep and transparent fondness for Chief Justice John Roberts even more moving. Although Stevens' political ideology rarely aligns with that of the chief, he talks of Roberts with the pride of a doting uncle. Roberts not only managed to change Stevens' mind on a death-penalty case but shares Stevens' "interest in administering justice impartially." One of the qualities court watchers always treasured in Stevens was his lack of pretension or ego, his fundamental decency toward everyone. In lauding Roberts for declining to advance his "own point of view," Stevens is celebrating the man who pulled off the gold stripes. Stevens prizes judicial decency and humility above politics.
San Francisco newspapers noted recently that the chief judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals turned to a colleague who was dominating oral argument and snapped, "I want you to shut up long enough for me to suggest that you should give some other judge a chance. ..." This is precisely the kind of cable-news incivility that has poisoned political discourse around the country and - blessedly - still shocks us at the federal courts. It's also the kind of language Stevens has eschewed his entire life, both on the bench and off. Musing about his conservative colleagues and their narrow reading of the "cruel and unusual" provision of the Eighth Amendment, Stevens merely suggests: "Just as the Eighth Amendment itself responds to evolving standards of decency in a maturing society, so also may the views of individual justices become more civilized after twenty years of service on the Court." Coming from anyone else that might sound like condescension. Coming from the last of a dying breed of jurists that genuinely believes you can learn something from everyone if you just listen hard enough, it is a lesson in how at the Supreme Court civility and cordiality matter more, even, than doctrine.
Dahlia Lithwick is the Supreme Court correspondence for slate.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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