Path to the Supreme Court
In October 1933 a Cook County jury needed five hours to convict Ernest J. Stevens, manager of a hotel billed at its opening as the largest in the world, of embezzling $1.3 million. The Stevens Hotel had risen on Michigan Avenue in 1927 with three thousand rooms and the family fortune behind it; the Depression took the hotel and then the family itself. The grandfather who financed it suffered a stroke as the investigation closed in. An uncle shot himself. Only the father stood trial, and the father was the one the jury condemned. A year later the Supreme Court of Illinois threw the conviction out unanimously, finding in the whole record 'not a scintilla of evidence' of fraud. John Paul Stevens was thirteen when the verdict came in and fourteen when it was erased, and he carried the lesson for the rest of a very long life. In the last of his books he wrote that firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system's fallibility had 'reinforced my conviction that the death penalty should be abolished.' Few justices have arrived at the Supreme Court with such personal instruction in the difference between a verdict and the truth.
Until the fall, the boyhood was gilded. Born in Chicago on April 20, 1920, Stevens grew up in the hotel's orbit: at seven he shook Charles Lindbergh's hand at a civic dinner in the aviator's honor, and the family kept the dove Lindbergh gave them, named Lindy. At twelve he sat with his father behind third base at Wrigley Field for the third game of the 1932 World Series, and he spent the rest of his life testifying to what he saw. 'I was sitting behind third base, with my dad, and it really happened,' he said of Babe Ruth's called shot. He took a degree in English literature at the University of Chicago in 1941, Phi Beta Kappa, and on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy.
The Navy taught him cryptography by correspondence course, posted him to its code-breaking section in Washington, and sent him in 1943 to Pearl Harbor as a traffic analyst in the fleet radio unit, reading the pattern of Japanese naval signals rather than their content. He was there in April 1943, two days before his twenty-third birthday, when word came back that the ambush of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, planned from decoded intercepts, had succeeded; the message reported that the pilots had 'bagged a peacock and two sparrows.' 'I had mixed feelings at the time,' Stevens said long afterward, 'because, on the one hand, it was an important and successful operation but, on the other hand, it was a deliberate elimination of a specific individual.' He left the service a lieutenant commander, with a Bronze Star for his work in naval communications from March 1942 to September 1945.
Northwestern's law school took him on the G.I. Bill and got back, in two accelerated years, the magna cum laude graduate of 1947 whose marks are still described as the highest in the school's history. He was co-editor of the law review, and when a clerkship with Justice Wiley B. Rutledge (§83) came open, Stevens and his co-editor settled it with a coin flip. Stevens won, skipped his own convocation to reach Washington early, and spent the October 1947 term in Rutledge's chambers, where he drafted the justice's dissent in Ahrens v. Clark, a case about whether prisoners held beyond a district court's borders could reach habeas corpus at all. The clerkship left a mark he never disguised. The dissent left one the law would not collect for fifty-six years.
He went home to Chicago, put his name on an antitrust firm of his own by 1952, taught the subject at Northwestern and at Chicago, and did the committee work of a rising bar figure: associate counsel to the House subcommittee studying monopoly power in 1951, member of the Attorney General's national antitrust committee from 1953 to 1955. Then, in the summer of 1969, Illinois learned that two justices of its supreme court had come by stock in a bank tied to a politically connected defendant while the man's case was before their court, and a hastily created special commission needed a counsel nobody could buy. Stevens took the job without pay and by the end of July had signed a report finding an appearance of impropriety 'so substantial and pervasive' that it urged 'the prompt resignation of the two Justices.' Both resigned. The quiet antitrust lawyer was suddenly the most trusted name at the Illinois bar, and in 1970 Richard Nixon named him to the Seventh Circuit.
William O. Douglas (§79) retired in November 1975 after the longest service in the Court's history, and Gerald Ford, holding the first Supreme Court vacancy since Watergate, wanted a nominee whose merit no one could argue with. He handed the search to his Attorney General, Edward Levi, the University of Chicago's former president, and Levi came back with his fellow Chicagoan. Ford announced the choice on November 28, 1975. The proceedings that followed now read like the last of their innocence: the first vacancy since Roe v. Wade came and went without a single senator asking Stevens a question about abortion, and the Senate confirmed him 98–0 on December 17 after five minutes of floor discussion. He took his seat on December 19, 1975. Thirty years later Ford measured his own presidency by the choice, writing to a Fordham symposium: 'I am prepared to allow history's judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.'
On the Supreme Court
He arrived in a bow tie and kept it on for thirty-five years, and the manner matched: at argument he waited out his colleagues and then began, 'May I ask just one more question?', a courtesy the advocate Paul Clement remembered as 'always highly intelligent and often fatal.' Nothing else about him proved so predictable. In his early years Stevens went his own way so often that the press filed him under maverick and wild card, and the opinions that lasted defy any label. In FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978) he let the government keep George Carlin's seven dirty words off afternoon radio. In Sony v. Universal (1984) he saved the home videocassette recorder, holding that the maker of a machine 'capable of substantial noninfringing uses' is not liable for what its buyers tape. And in Chevron v. NRDC (1984) he wrote, without any sense of occasion, the sentence administrative law would orbit for forty years: where a statute is 'silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.' By the account preserved in his papers he crafted the test in an afternoon and did not think he was revolutionizing anything; the Court overruled it in 2024, five years after his death, and the argument about it has not ended.
The war never entirely left him. When the Court held flag burning to be protected speech in Texas v. Johnson (1989), Stevens filed his own dissent: 'The value of the flag as a symbol cannot be measured.' The dissent fit no chart anyone kept of him. Harry Blackmun's (§98) retirement in 1994 made Stevens the senior Associate Justice, assigning the Court's opinion whenever he was in the majority and the Chief Justice was not, and the reputed loner turned out to be a patient builder of majorities. 'If you looked at his first three or four years on the court, you'd say he was a quirky middle-of-the-roader with no vision,' the law professor Dennis Hutchinson said in 2006, but three decades on 'he's moved into a very influential position.' The second half of the tenure shows what he did with it. In Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000) he moved sentencing power back to juries: apart from a prior conviction, 'any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.' In Atkins v. Virginia (2002) he held that the Eighth Amendment forbids executing the intellectually disabled. And when the Court halted the Florida recount in Bush v. Gore (2000), his dissent supplied the sentence the controversy still wears: 'Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.'
The detainee cases were his. In Rasul v. Bush (2004) he held that Guantanamo's prisoners could invoke habeas corpus, and in a footnote he reached back fifty-six years to quote the Ahrens dissent he had helped draft as a clerk of twenty-seven. 'I was particularly familiar with that dissent,' he told a Chicago audience that year, 'because the case just so happened to be decided during the year in which I was a law clerk for Justice Rutledge.' In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) he struck down the military commissions because their 'structure and procedures violate both the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions.' And in Baze v. Rees (2008) he finally said plainly what he had come to think of capital punishment, borrowing the old words of Byron White (§93) to call it 'the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.' Then, deferring to the Court's precedents, he voted to uphold Kentucky's execution protocol anyway. The conviction was announced and the judgment was joined, in the same opinion, by the same judge.
Not every landmark aged in his favor. He wrote Kelo v. City of New London (2005), upholding a city's power to condemn homes for economic development, and spent his retirement answering for it, conceding in a speech the Court itself published that it was 'the most unpopular opinion that I wrote during my 34-year tenure on the Supreme Court' while defending every step of its law. He answered Scalia's (§103) originalist triumph in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) with a dissent agreeing that the Second Amendment 'protects a right that can be enforced by individuals' and denying that this settled anything about the right's scope. And on January 21, 2010, when the Court freed corporate treasuries for political spending in Citizens United v. FEC, the eighty-nine-year-old justice's dissent ran to ninety pages and ended dryly: 'While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.'
By then the Ford appointee led the Court's liberal wing, and the distance between 1975 and 2010 needed explaining. His explanation never changed: 'I don't think that my votes represent a change in my own thinking. I'm just disagreeing with changes that the others are making.' He called himself a judicial conservative and did the arithmetic of the membership instead: 'Including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell has been more conservative than his or her predecessor.' The Supreme Court Database keeps a different set of books. Across 4,019 coded votes his liberal share was 60.4 percent against a docket baseline of 46.4, the ninth highest share among the thirty-three justices of the modern era, and his dissent rate of 26.3 percent trails only the second Justice Harlan and Thurgood Marshall among them. The drift series is blunter. His gap over the docket baseline ran from 7.3 points in his early terms to 20.9 in his last ones, a climb of 13.6 points, sixth largest on record, and the decomposition assigns 12.0 of those points to statistically real movement by the justice while the measured shift of the rest of the bench across his years fails significance. The numbers count outcomes, not convictions: they say the voting record moved, and mostly on his side of the ledger; he said his thinking never did. A judge can hold still while the questions change, and outcome codes cannot tell the difference, so this chapter keeps both books and closes neither.
The morning he announced the Citizens United dissent, listeners noticed the words coming out wrong. 'I learned giving that talk that I had a speech problem,' he said in 2011; by the time of his memoir the episode had a name: 'Unbeknownst to me, I apparently had suffered a mini-stroke.' The decision followed at once. 'That was it. I made the decision that day. After I went to see the doctor, I sent a letter to the president right away.' On April 9, 2010, eleven days short of ninety, he told President Obama he would retire 'effective the next day after the Court rises for the summer recess this year.' When the Court rose that June he had served thirty-four and a half years, a span only William O. Douglas and Stephen J. Field (§38) exceed, Field by a margin best measured in days. Elena Kagan (§112) took the seat.
Retirement got three books out of him, Five Chiefs in 2011, Six Amendments in 2014, and The Making of a Justice at ninety-nine, along with a run of essays in the New York Review of Books and, in March 2018, a New York Times piece whose title said everything Heller had taught him: 'Repeal the Second Amendment.' He died in Fort Lauderdale on July 16, 2019, the day after a stroke, at ninety-nine the longest-lived justice in the Court's history. Chief Justice Roberts (§109) said he had 'brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom, and independence.' Ruth Bader Ginsburg (§107) called him 'my model for all a collegial judge should be' and remembered his openness to what he called 'learning on the job.' The schooling had begun early, in a Chicago courtroom in 1933, watching the system be wrong about his father. He spent the rest of a century on the record declining to assume it had stopped being wrong.
The Voting Record
How Stevens voted in the 4,163 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1975 term through the 2009 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Stevens voted with Ginsburg more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 70.1% of their 824 divided cases — and with Thomas least, at 20.5%. See the matrices →Compared against the 15 colleagues Stevens shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Stevens ended 13.6 points more liberal relative to those colleagues than at the start — the sixth-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC
1984Holding · When a statute is ambiguous, courts must defer to any reasonable interpretation by the agency that administers it.
Role · Stevens wrote for the Court.
For forty years the foundation of administrative law and the balance of power between courts and agencies, until overruled in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024).
Read the opinion →District of Columbia v. Heller
2008Holding · (Dissenting) The Second Amendment protects a right tied to militia service, not an individual right to possess firearms for private purposes.
Role · Stevens wrote the principal dissent, answering Scalia's (§103) originalist majority on its own terms.
The sharpest confrontation of interpretive methods in modern constitutional law — two readings of the same words reaching opposite results.
Read the opinion →Bush v. Gore
2000Holding · (Dissenting) Halting the Florida recount was a grave error; 'the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.'
Role · Stevens wrote a stinging dissent.
His most quoted dissent — a warning about the Court's legitimacy after it effectively decided a presidential election.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
John Paul Stevens served thirty-five years on the Supreme Court, longer than all but two justices in history, and traveled a remarkable distance without ever quite changing his mind about what he was doing: a Chicago antitrust lawyer and Navy codebreaker appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 as a moderate Republican, he retired in 2010 as the leader of the Court's liberal wing — not, he insisted, because he had moved left, but because the Court had moved right around him. Independent to the point of idiosyncrasy, he wrote his own opinions, asked the sharpest questions from the bench, and produced landmarks across the law: Chevron v. NRDC, the most-cited administrative-law decision ever written, and a series of towering dissents — in Bush v. Gore, in District of Columbia v. Heller, in Citizens United — that read as briefs to a future Court. Ford called Stevens's appointment the act by which he was content to have his presidency judged. Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman's biography is the fullest life; Stevens also told his own story in a late memoir. Begin with the biography, then read Chevron and the great dissents.
The Bookshelf
The fullest biography of Stevens, and the best starting point for a long and independent life. Barnhart and Schlickman trace the Chicago boyhood (his family owned the grand Stevens Hotel), the Navy service breaking Japanese codes at Pearl Harbor, the antitrust practice, the Seventh Circuit years, and the thirty-five years on the Supreme Court, drawing on interviews with Stevens himself. Sympathetic and thorough, it captures the courtly maverick who never joined a bloc and never stopped writing for himself. Northern Illinois University Press.
The making of the justice — Kenneth Manaster's account of the 1969 Illinois judicial-corruption scandal that Stevens, as special counsel, helped expose, lifting an obscure Chicago antitrust lawyer toward the bench. The best book on where Stevens came from. University of Chicago Press.
An early study of Stevens's jurisprudence, written in his second decade on the Court — the first attempt to find the method behind his famously independent, case-by-case opinions. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Stevens's own memoir, written in his late nineties and published the year he died — an unhurried, term-by-term walk through his life and cases from the inside. He is candid about his evolution, generous about colleagues across the spectrum, and revealing about the opinions and dissents he cared most about. Long and discursive, it is less an argument than a remembrance, but no source brings you closer to how Stevens understood his own remarkable tenure. Little, Brown. Pair it with his shorter Five Chiefs (2011) for his portraits of the men who led the Court.
Stevens's warm memoir of the five Chief Justices he knew — from Fred Vinson (§85), for whom he clerked, to John Roberts (§109) — a genial insider's tour of the modern Court through the men who led it. Little, Brown.
The retired justice as reformer — Stevens's brief, pointed case for six constitutional amendments, on guns, the death penalty, gerrymandering, and money in politics, distilling the causes of his late dissents into proposals. Little, Brown.
For four decades the single most consequential opinion in administrative law, and among the most cited in the Court's history. Stevens held that when a statute is ambiguous, courts must defer to any reasonable interpretation by the agency charged with administering it — the 'Chevron deference' that shaped the balance of power between courts, agencies, and Congress across the entire regulatory state. Stevens himself later doubted how far it had been stretched, and the Court overruled it in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024). Read the original to understand the doctrine that governed a generation of American government, and what its passing changed.
Stevens's most famous dissent, and a model of the form. Answering Justice Scalia's majority — which held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms unconnected to militia service — Stevens marshaled text, history, and precedent to argue the opposite, insisting the Amendment's militia clause was no accident of drafting. Two originalists reading the same words reached opposite conclusions; read the majority and dissent together as the sharpest confrontation of interpretive methods in modern constitutional law, and as an example of a dissent written for the long verdict of history. Read alongside his Bush v. Gore and Citizens United dissents.
Stevens's coldest fury. As the Court halted the Florida recount and effectively decided the 2000 election, he dissented that although we may never know the true winner, 'the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.' The dissent that framed the modern debate over the Court's legitimacy. Free online.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Barnhart and Schlickman, An Independent Life — for the fullest account of a long, independent career
- 2.Stevens, The Making of a Justice — for the whole tenure in his own unhurried voice
- 3.Chevron v. NRDC — for the most consequential opinion he wrote
- 4.Heller dissent — for the great dissent and the clash of interpretive methods
- 5.Manaster, Illinois Justice — for the scandal that launched him toward the bench
Where the Papers Are Kept
Stevens's papers were placed at the Library of Congress, and portions have been opened to researchers in stages — early releases drew wide attention for their files on Bush v. Gore and other landmark cases, offering a rare inside look at the deliberations of a justice who kept his own counsel. As more of the collection becomes available it will be a major archive for the Court from the Ford era through the Roberts Court. A significant modern judicial collection. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- Did Stevens move, or did the Court? Stevens always denied that he drifted left, insisting he stayed put while the Court's center shifted rightward beneath him. Test the claim against the record — his votes on the death penalty, affirmative action, executive power, and campaign finance across thirty-five years — and ask what it means to measure a justice's 'movement' against a moving baseline.
- The dissent as a brief to the future. Stevens's dissents in Bush v. Gore, Heller, and Citizens United were written not to persuade his colleagues but to address later generations and a later Court. Study the great dissent as a literary and strategic form — what it can accomplish that a majority cannot, and how Stevens used it — and ask which of his dissents have aged into something like vindication.
- The independent method. Stevens famously wrote his own first drafts and refused to run with any bloc, prizing the particular facts of each case over grand theory. Weigh the strengths and costs of his case-by-case independence against the more systematic approaches of contemporaries like Scalia (§103), and ask what a Court gains, and loses, from a justice who insists on thinking everything through for himself. Seat lineage: William O. Douglas §79 → John Paul Stevens → Elena Kagan §112.