Justice Stevens, who doesn't usually grant interviews, has two set for print tomorrow - one with the WaPo and one with the NYT. Speculation is that this may be his "victory lap" before bidding farewell. We'll know within a couple weeks...
:popcorn:
Justice John Paul Stevens wants what's 'best for the court'
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 3, 2010; 3:13 PM
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- Around here, one of the most powerful men in the nation is known as plain old John Stevens -- courteous bridge player, early-morning regular at the country club's tennis courts, a quiet and spry condo neighbor who checks his weight in the gym before heading off for his daily swim.
But those who cross paths with him in his second home of South Florida have the same question as the president of the United States, the leadership of Congress, the abortion rights combatants, the disgruntled conservative legal activists and the grateful civil libertarians, all of whom know him as Justice John Paul Stevens.
"Do you think he's going to retire?" asks his friend Raymond A. Doumar, an 83-year-old lawyer who met Stevens years ago waiting for a tennis match.
Stevens, who turns 90 later this month, isn't quite ready to say. "I can tell you that I love the job and deciding whether to leave it is a very difficult decision," he said in an interview. "But I want to make it in a way that's best for the court."
That would mean a decision sooner rather than later, in time for the nomination and confirmation process to be completed before a new term begins in October, he said. He acknowledged that he had told a reporter early last month that he would decide in about 30 days, but laughed that he hoped "that wasn't being treated as a statute of limitations."
Whether it is this year or the next, he said, he will hand President Obama his second chance to leave a lasting mark on the nine-member Supreme Court. "I will surely do it while he's still president," Stevens said.
If he stays past this term, Stevens will remain on a course to become the oldest and longest-serving justice ever. Paradoxically, he is also among the court's least-known members; in one poll taken last summer, only 1 percent of Americans could summon his name.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/03/AR2010040301693_pf.htmlAt 89, Stevens Contemplates Law, and How to Leave ItBy ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — “There are still pros and cons to be considered,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in his Supreme Court chambers on Friday afternoon, reflecting on his reluctance to leave a job he loves after almost 35 years. But his calculus seemed to be weighted toward departure, and he said his decision on the matter would come very soon.
“I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process,” he said. “The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”
Hints about Justice Stevens’s possible departure started in September, when he confirmed that he had hired only a single law clerk, instead of the usual four, for the term that will start this fall. In occasional public statements since then, Justice Stevens, the leader of the court’s liberal wing, said he had not yet made up his mind. But the White House is bracing for a summertime confirmation battle, the second of the Obama presidency.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 this month, said he did not like to give interviews “because it saves an awful lot of time if you don’t.” But he was courtly and candid in reviewing the trajectory of his tenure on the court and in summing up what he had learned about the role of the judge in American life.
Like last year’s selection of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Justice David H. Souter, this change would be unlikely to remake the court’s ideological balance. But the matter would in some ways have more resonance, if only because of Justice Stevens’s seniority and mastery of the court’s machinery.
Appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, Justice Stevens was in those days considered a somewhat idiosyncratic moderate. These days, he is lionized by the left. But Justice Stevens rejected those labels on Friday, saying that his judicial philosophy was a conservative one.
“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job,” he said, relaxed in shirt sleeves and his signature bow tie in chambers floodlit by April sunshine. “Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04stevens.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes&pagewanted=print
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