Justice served: U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens's thirty-five-year tenure was marked by intellectual rigor, lack of pretention, and the firm belief that absolutism had no place on the bench.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir - Book review

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir

by John Paul Stevens

Little Brown and Company, 340 pp.

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In an age of judicial philosophies, abstract methods of interpretation, and trite baseball metaphors, John Paul Stevens was a common-law judge. Justice Antonin Scalia practices textualism; Justice Clarence Thomas practices originalism. Chief Justice John Roberts is developing a sort of reactionary legalism. Even the Supreme Court's liberals have gotten in on the game. In a head-scratching 2005 book, Justice Stephen Breyer professed his theory of "active liberty," which has not exactly caught on as a beacon for progressive constitutionalists.

Through the din of this nonsense one delighted to hear the strong plain chords of a Stevens, who harkened back to an earlier breed of jurist. His lights were not the so-called "neutral principles" hashed out in law review articles and perfected in warlike opinions by judge-partisans. They were centuries-old practices like judicial restraint, respect for the Court's precedents and procedures, and, above all, an anachronistic faith in judges' discretion. In his new book, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, Stevens favorably quotes Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of obscenity, "I know it when I see it." But where, cry the legal theorists, is the principle in that sort of decision making? Stevens might reply that it's amazing how many cases a judge will get right when he has no dogma to uphold and no movement to lead.

Stevens's retirement from the Supreme Court in 2010 after thirty-four years of service was a tremendous loss for the country. As the senior associate justice for sixteen years, he led the liberal wing through the Court's highest and lowest moments since Watergate. The high point both for the institution and Stevens personally was the trio of war-on-terror cases in which the Court put a stop to President Bush's lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay. Stevens wrote the two most important opinions--Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)--and supervised a majority in a third, Boumediene v. Bush (2008). (He dissented in two other war-on-terror cases in 2004.) The low point was a pair of decisions that might best be described as institutionalized lawlessness. In Bush v. Gore (2000) the Court reached out and handed Bush the presidency, and in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) it struck clown most legal restrictions on corporate campaign spending. Stevens issued the two great dissents of his career in those cases, noting pointedly the damage the Court had done to itself. If only he were still there to help with the repairs.

The Court's liberals stood behind Stevens in Citizens United--as they did throughout much of the 2000s. He proved a canny strategist and leader, assigning opinions in a way that preserved majorities and shaped future coalitions. He secured key victories in decisions limiting capital punishment and permitting affirmative action. In Five Chiefs he implies that he cultivated Justice Anthony Kennedy in gay rights litigation from the mid-1990s. Stevens assigned Kennedy to write the Court's 1996...