Scott Lemieux says that during his years on the Court, John Paul Stevens emerged as its foremost critic of unequal treatment under the law.
When John Paul Stevens was nominated by Gerald Ford to replace William O. Douglas, few could have predicted that the moderate Republican Stevens would in many respects fill Douglas’ role as the irascible liberal giant on the Court. Yet as his recent article about his opposition to the death penalty reminds us, during his long and often idiosyncratic career, Stevens emerged as the Court’s foremost critic of unequal treatment under the law. In particular, he became the Court’s strongest critic of the increasingly formalistic approach to race taken by a majority of his colleagues and was always more attentive to gender inequality than his country-club Republican pedigree would have suggested.
