In 2008, Justice Stevens wrote the lead opinion for the court in a case upholding the constitutionality of Indiana’s new voter-ID law. The law had been sold as a way of preventing one type of voter fraud, but as Justice David Souter pointed out in dissent, there was no evidence that such fraud actually occurred, and in the meantime the law made it much harder for many voters to cast a ballot. In 2013, Justice Stevens told The Wall Street Journal that while he still believed his 2008 opinion was correct given the information available to him at the time, “as a matter of actual history,” Justice Souter was “dead right.”

This humility was one of many ways in which Justice Stevens seemed from another era — one of brightly colored bow ties, decency and nonpartisan comity. An era when a justice’s vote couldn’t be predicted based on the party of the president who nominated him.

When Justice Stevens joined the court in 1975, it was an all-male, nearly all-white institution. The justice he replaced, William O. Douglas, had been picked by President Franklin Roosevelt. Justice Stevens’s confirmation by the Senate came less than three weeks after President Gerald Ford nominated him. The vote was unanimous, a scenario as unimaginable today as it was unremarkable then.

He was a Republican jurist nominated by a Republican president, but by the time he stepped down, he had become the leader of the court’s liberal wing. Over the years he wrote major opinions on the death penalty, the scope of the president’s power to detain enemy combatants and the role of government agencies in making regulations. All along he insisted that it wasn’t he who had moved left but the court that had moved right. “I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told The Times in 2007. “I’m pretty darn conservative.”

After nearly 3 5 years on the court — the third-longest tenure of any justice — Justice Stevens stepped down, but it was clear that he yearned to stay in the middle of the action. In his book “Six Amendments,” he called for major constitutional reforms, including the abolishment of the Second Amendment and the death penalty, and amendments that placed greater controls on partisan gerrymandering and campaign finance.

The Times’s editorial board wasn’t spared Justice Stevens’s piercing gaze. In 2015, he wrote a letter to the editor criticizing an editorial on the court’s role in policing prosecutorial misconduct. The editorial described an abominable 2011 decision in which the court overturned a jury’s $14 million reward to a Louisiana man who had been wrongly convicted of murder and spent 14 years on death row because a prosecutor hid evidence that proved his innocence.

The editorial called on the court to take a more aggressive role in punishing prosecutorial misconduct like the kind in the Louisiana case . Justice Stevens would have gone further. He agreed that the 2011 ruling had been a “manifest injustice.” Still, he said, the editorial failed to identify the most effective way to hold prosecutors responsible.