Stevens, John Paul (1920-2019), served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 to 2010. President Gerald R. Ford chose him to replace Justice William O. Douglas, who retired. President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan, an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, to fill the vacancy created by Stevens’s retirement.
On the Supreme Court, Stevens took increasingly liberal positions on a variety of issues. At first, he opposed affirmative-action programs, which are designed to remedy the effects of past discrimination against such groups as women and minorities. But later, he voted to uphold such programs. He also supported the 1973 Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe v. Wade. In this case, the court ruled that, except under certain conditions, the states could not prohibit a woman from having an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy (see Roe v. Wade). In 2010, Stevens strongly disagreed with a court decision that lifted restrictions on corporate spending in elections.
Stevens was born on April 20, 1920, in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1941 and from Northwestern University School of Law in 1947. In 1947 and 1948, he served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge. Stevens began practicing law in Chicago in 1948. In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After his retirement, Stevens wrote Five Chiefs (2011), a memoir. The book describes Stevens’s experiences with five chief justices of the United States. Stevens also wrote Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (2014) and The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (2019). Stevens died on July 16, 2019.
