Friday, April 09, 2010

For Decades, Stevens Molded Supreme Court Decisions

John Paul Stevens is about to turn 90 and his retirement has been rumored for a while so that means people have pre-written plenty of stories about him. I found this one from NPR For Decades, Stevens Molded Supreme Court Decisions, to be particularly interesting. Some things I learned:

"'It bothers him a great deal whenever he hears himself portrayed as a liberal,' Mikva says. 'When we're together, he looks at me playfully and says, 'Now, Ab, you know I'm not a liberal.' And I do.'"

"Sloan, the onetime law clerk, sees the Bush v. Gore and Clinton v. Jones opinions as flip sides of the same coin. "He has a very deep respect for the crucible of litigation," says Sloan. "And in both cases, what he was strongly objecting to was the suggestion that there be some kind of arbitrary shortcut." In the Clinton case, the shortcut would have been to delay a trial, and the court unanimously rejected that. In Bush v. Gore, the shortcut was to remove the case from the Florida state courts, where vote-count cases are traditionally resolved, and Stevens bitterly objected."

"One of his least-known efforts involved the machine that became ubiquitous in American homes: the TV video recorder. In the early 1980s, Hollywood tried to ban the devices and punish both the manufacturer and the home user with fines for copyright infringement. A majority of the court initially agreed with the filmmakers, but Stevens' proposed dissent turned the court around, and he ended up writing the court's 5-4 opinion declaring that VCRs did not violate copyright laws when used in the home to make a single copy for personal use."

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