54 Facts About John Paul Stevens

John Paul Stevens was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 to 2010.

John Paul Stevens became the senior associate justice after the retirement of Harry Blackmun in 1994.

John Paul Stevens retired in 2010 during the administration of President Barack Obama and was succeeded by Elena Kagan.

John Paul Stevens was born on April 20,1920, in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, to a wealthy family.

John Paul Stevens's father, Ernest James Stevens, was a lawyer who later became an hotelier, owning two hotels, the La Salle and the Stevens Hotel.

John Paul Stevens's mother, Elizabeth Street Stevens, was a high school English teacher.

The family lived in Hyde Park, and John Paul Stevens attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where he graduated in 1937.

John Paul Stevens later attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in English, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated with highest honors in 1941.

John Paul Stevens began work on his master's degree in English at the university in 1941 but soon decided to join the United States Navy.

John Paul Stevens enlisted on December 6,1941, one day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater from 1942 to 1945.

John Paul Stevens was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the codebreaking team whose work led to the downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plane in 1943.

John Paul Stevens had four children: John Joseph, Kathryn, Elizabeth, and Susan.

John Paul Stevens determined that he would not stay long at the Poppenhusen firm after being docked his pay for the day he took off to travel to Springfield to swear his oath of admission.

John Paul Stevens's growing expertise in antitrust law led to an invitation to teach the "Competition and Monopoly" course at the University of Chicago Law School, and from 1953 to 1955, he was a member of the Attorney General's National Committee to Study Antitrust Laws.

John Paul Stevens was widely regarded by colleagues as an extraordinarily capable and impressive lawyer with a fantastic memory and analytical ability, and authored a number of influential works on antitrust law.

The commission was widely thought to be a whitewash, but John Paul Stevens proved them wrong by vigorously prosecuting the justices, forcing them from office in the end.

John Paul Stevens's nomination was put forth by a former University of Chicago classmate, Illinois Senator Charles H Percy.

When Harry Blackmun retired in 1994, John Paul Stevens became the senior associate justice and thus assumed the administrative duties of the Court whenever the post of Chief Justice of the United States was vacant or the chief justice was unable to perform his duties.

Also in September 2005, John Paul Stevens was honored with a symposium by Fordham Law School for his 30 years on the Supreme Court, and President Ford wrote a letter stating his continued pride in appointing him.

John Paul Stevens was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.

On January 20,2009, John Paul Stevens administered the oath of office to Vice President Joe Biden at Biden's request.

John Paul Stevens was the last veteran of the Burger Court to remain on the bench.

John Paul Stevens was the second-oldest justice, at age 90 years and two months at retirement, behind Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

On July 23,2015, John Paul Stevens became the longest-lived retired justice, surpassing Stanley Forman Reed who died at age 95 years and 93 days on April 2,1980.

When he was appointed to the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens was a registered Republican.

Abner Mikva, a close friend, said that as a judge, John Paul Stevens refused to discuss politics.

In October 2018, John Paul Stevens said that Brett Kavanaugh's performance during his confirmation hearings should disqualify him from serving on the Supreme Court, citing the potential for political bias.

Early in his tenure on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens had a relatively moderate voting record.

However, on the more conservative Rehnquist Court, John Paul Stevens joined the more liberal justices on issues such as abortion rights, gay rights and federalism.

John Paul Stevens was not an originalist nor a pragmatist, nor did he pronounce himself a cautious liberal.

John Paul Stevens was considered part of the liberal bloc of the Court starting in the mid-1980s, and was dubbed the "chief justice of the liberal Supreme Court", though he publicly called himself a judicial conservative in 2007.

John Paul Stevens wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion in Citizens United v FEC, arguing the majority should not make a decision so broad that it would overturn precedents set in three previous Supreme Court cases.

John Paul Stevens generally supported students' right to free speech in public schools.

When interpreting the Interstate Commerce Clause, John Paul Stevens consistently sided with the federal government.

John Paul Stevens had a generally libertarian voting record on the Fourth Amendment, which deals with search and seizure.

John Paul Stevens questioned whether Kentucky Derby second-place finisher Eight Belles died more humanely than those on death row.

John Paul Stevens explained that his death penalty decisions were influenced, in part, by an increasing awareness through DNA testing of the fallibility of death sentences, and the fact that death-qualified juries come with a set of biases.

Unlike some other members of the Court, John Paul Stevens was consistently willing to find organic statutes unambiguous and thus overturn agency interpretations of those statutes.

John Paul Stevens believed that the holding displayed "an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed".

John Paul Stevens's dissent was joined by justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer; the majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia.

On March 27,2018, days after the March for Our Lives demonstrations in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, described by many media outlets as a possible tipping point for gun control legislation, John Paul Stevens wrote an essay for The New York Times, stating that the demonstrators should be demanding the outright repeal of the Second Amendment.

In 2011, John Paul Stevens published a memoir entitled Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, which detailed his legal career during the tenure of five of the Supreme Court's chief justices.

In 2014, John Paul Stevens published Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, where he proposed that six amendments should be added to the US Constitution to address political gerrymandering, anti-commandeering, campaign finance reform, capital punishment, gun violence, and sovereign immunity.

In 2019, at age 99 and shortly before his death, John Paul Stevens published The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years.

John Paul Stevens was on the high court when the couple divorced thirty-seven years later in 1979.

John Paul Stevens was a Protestant, and upon his retirement, the Supreme Court had no Protestant members for the first time in its history.

John Paul Stevens was an avid bridge player and belonged to the Pompano Duplicate Bridge Club Florida.

On July 16,2019, John Paul Stevens died at the age of 99 at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from complications of a stroke.

John Paul Stevens received hospice care and was with his two surviving children, Elizabeth and Susan, when he died.

John Paul Stevens lay in repose at the Supreme Court on July 22,2019 before a planned burial at Arlington National Cemetery the following day.

John Paul Stevens was portrayed by the actor William Schallert in the 2008 film Recount.

John Paul Stevens was portrayed by David Grant Wright in two episodes of Boston Legal in which Alan Shore and Denny Crane appear before the Supreme Court.

John Paul Stevens appeared in interviews in two episodes of Ken Burns's 2011 PBS documentary miniseries Prohibition, recalling his childhood in Chicago in the 1920s and 30s.

John Paul Stevens was 12 years old when he was at Wrigley Field for the 1932 World Series game at which Babe Ruth hit his "called shot" home run.