John Paul Stevens

Stevens was born April 20, 1920, into a wealthy Hyde Park family; his father ran the La Salle and Stevens hotels until the Depression took them, and two of his three older brothers became lawyers before him. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1941 with the highest honors in English, then enlisted in the Navy on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor. As an intelligence officer in the Pacific he worked on code-breaking that helped locate and shoot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943, earning a Bronze Star. After the war he finished first in his class at Northwestern's law school, with the highest grade average in the school's history, and clerked for Justice Wiley Rutledge before building an antitrust practice in Chicago.

President Nixon put Stevens on the Seventh Circuit in 1970; President Ford, a fellow Republican, nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1975 to replace William O. Douglas, and the Senate confirmed him 98 to 0. He sat for 34 years and six months, the third-longest tenure in Court history, writing the majority opinion in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the 1984 decision giving federal agencies wide latitude to interpret ambiguous laws, and in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the military commissions set up after September 11. He dissented in District of Columbia v. Heller against an individual right to bear arms and, in Citizens United v. FEC, called the ruling a disaster for American election law. He retired in 2010, at 90, the Court's most reliably liberal member and the last Protestant to sit on it.

Stevens was appointed as a moderate Republican and, by his own account, simply kept learning on the job; a justice who voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1976's Gregg v. Georgia later called that vote the only one of his career he regretted, and by his final years argued state-sanctioned killing had become obsolete. He came to see his own confirmation-era votes on affirmative action and gun rights as mistakes worth correcting in public, an unusual thing for a retired justice to do in a 2018 op-ed calling for the Second Amendment's repeal, which drew fire even from allies who agreed with his reasoning but not his tactics. The party that put him on the bench spent the rest of his life pointing to him as proof its appointments do not always turn out the way a president expects.

Stevens died of complications from a stroke on July 16, 2019, in Fort Lauderdale, at 99, the longest-lived justice in Supreme Court history, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Ford, who had no regrets about the appointment, said Stevens served with dignity and intellect and without partisan concern; his opinions on agency deference, executive power after September 11, and campaign finance are still cited on both sides of arguments the country has not settled. He argued to the end, against most Shakespeare scholars, that the plays were written by the Earl of Oxford, a minority position on the one subject where he was content to lose.

John Paul Stevens's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council case
  Majority opinion establishing 'Chevron deference' for agency interpretation 1984
• Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case
  Majority opinion striking down military commissions at Guantanamo 2006
• Citizens United v. FEC dissent case
  Called the campaign-finance ruling 'a disaster for our election law' 2010
• Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir book
  Memoir spanning his service under five chief justices 2011
• Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution book
  Proposed constitutional amendments on gerrymandering, guns and campaign finance 2014

• April 20, 1920 aged 0 Born in Chicago, Illinois
• December 6, 1941 aged 21 Enlists in the Navy, one day before Pearl Harbor
• 1947 aged ~27 Graduates first in his class from Northwestern University School of Law
• November 2, 1970 aged 50 Appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by Nixon
• December 19, 1975 aged 55 Sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, confirmed 98-0
• 1984 aged ~64 Writes the majority opinion in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council
• June 29, 2010 aged 90 Retires from the Supreme Court at 90
• 2019 aged ~99 Publishes his final memoir, The Making of a Justice
• July 16, 2019 aged 99 Dies in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 99

• Gerald Ford 1913–2006
  38th president who restored basic governmental stability after Watergate and controversially pardoned Richard Nixon. appointed
• William O. Douglas 1898–1980
  Longest-serving Supreme Court justice, noted for expansive civil-liberties jurisprudence and environmental advocacy. succeeded
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. frequent ideological opponent
• George Carlin 1937–2008
  Comedian whose linguistic precision and challenges to censorship made him a defining voice in modern American stand-up. wrote the majority opinion in his Supreme Court case