THE MAKING OF A JUSTICE

Reflections on My First 94 Years

By John Paul Stevens

John Paul Stevens ended his remarkable 35-year term on the Supreme Court with the approval of the Republican president who appointed him and the Democratic one who replaced him. Gerald Ford wrote in 2005 that he was prepared to let “history’s judgment” of his presidency rest exclusively on his decision in 1975 to nominate Stevens. Barack Obama scrawled his endorsement on a birthday note to Stevens in 2014 — “We miss you on the Court!”

The cross-party embrace of Stevens by these two presidents shows the distance to the right the Republican Party has traveled from Ford to Trump far more than Stevens’s own shift in the opposite direction. He was the last of a group of Republican appointees (Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, David Souter and, to a degree, Sandra Day O’Connor) who breathed compassion into the law and put the impact of their decisions on real people above arid theories. In one of his last judicial opinions, Stevens wrote that his approach to interpreting the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty “is guided by history but not beholden to it.” He described his willingness to “protect some rights even if they have not already received uniform protection from the elected branches.” And crucially he argued that no method can separate the beliefs of individual judges from the work of the court. “It all depends on judges’ exercising careful, reasoned judgment,” Stevens wrote. “As it always has, and as it always will.”

[ John Paul Stevens has died. Read our obituary here. ]

Clues to how Stevens arrived at that conclusion are sprinkled through “The Making of a Justice,” but only if you dig for them. Stevens’s new book (the third since his retirement in 2010) is more catalog than sustained argument. It suffers from the burden of completism and the frustration of muffled drama. In 1933, when Stevens was 12, his father was charged with embezzlement, and a group of armed robbers who thought he’d hidden $1 million in tomato cans burst into the family’s house one evening. But Stevens plays down the effects. “I do not recall any special fear for our safety during the ensuing months in that year,” he writes.

Turning to his time as a justice, he devotes a chapter each to his 36 terms on the court. To follow the intellectual arc from one decision to a later one that relates to it, you have to read a lot of pages. Which, come to think of it, is probably what it feels like to do the work of a Supreme Court justice.