Republican-Turned-Liberal Ex-Supreme Court Justice Stevens Dies At 99

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speaks at a lecture presented by the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Ark., Wednesday, May 30, 2012. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
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Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the judge with the second-longest tenure on the highest court, has died at a hospital in Florida at the age of 99.

Stevens experienced significant personal transformation while on the bench, ideologically shifting from identifying as a Republican to leading the court’s liberal wing.

Put on the court by former President Gerald Ford, Stevens eschewed doctrinal purity in favor of weighing each case’s individual merits and facts.

Back in May, Stevens sat down with CNN to share his thoughts on Trump:

The New York Times has an extensive obituary on the justice’s life and body of work here.

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  1. I’m sure in response Trump will try and nominate another SC justice…

    McConnell will put it forward.

    The Media will collectively shrug “IOKIYAR”

    The house will issue a sternly worded letter bogged down with a history lesson that bores anyone who reads it to tears. Then make a big show of it in the floor which then turns attention on Trump response.

    Them well move onto the next travesty

  2. Avatar for kovie kovie says:

    I’m not sure that it’s correct or fair to state that he went from being a Repub to being a liberal. The two weren’t always mutually exclusive and back when he was first put on the court there were quite a few liberal Repubs, like Lindsay, Weicker, Javits, etc. I don’t know if he remained a Repub, but I think that he was always a liberal, by today’s standards at least, with a more “liberal” view of the constitution than most of his Repub contemporaries. Even Nixon and Ford were “liberal” compared to today’s Repubs.

    In any case, he was a fantastic jurist and decent man and will be missed.

  3. Frankly I believe he was relatively conservative always, in the true meaning of the word.

    It’s simply that “conservative” these days is better defined as “Radical”

  4. Or Racist.
    Or Reprehensible.
    Or Rotten to the Core.
    Or…

  5. Hang in there RBG!!!

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

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