Legal News

Up Close and Personal with Justices Stevens and Ginsburg

By Ashby Jones

Had enough of the Supreme Court this week, what with the SOTUgate and more fallout from the Citizens United case?

LBers, our love and admiration of you truly knows no bounds; and we feel your pain. But we’re going to force-feed you a bit more, like it or not. It’ll be good for you; we promise.

Let’s start here: The WSJ’s Jess Bravin recently interviewed Justice John Paul Stevens. Stevens talked at length to Bravin, not about his impending plans — it’s been widely rumored that Stevens, 89, will be the next justice to step down, possibly as early as this spring or summer — but about how he came to be nominated to the court back in the mid 1970s. He also shared his thoughts on a topic near and dear to his heart: political gerrymandering. Click here and here, respectively, for Bravin’s writeups.

“I may well have been his second choice,” Stevens said, alluding to Gerald Ford, the president who nominated Stevens to the high court. The frontrunner? According to Stevens, it was Edward Levi, a former University of Chicago president who served in the Ford cabinet as attorney general. But Levi, a respected academic whose appointment as attorney general was seen “as part of the recovery from Watergate,” took himself out of the running, Justice Stevens said.

On the gerrymandering topic, Stevens expressed concern about court rulings that give politicians wide leeway in drawing election-district lines, saying it worsens partisan divides in government.

Writes Bravin:

In the interview, Justice Stevens reiterated the criticism. “The gerrymandering practice is very, very harmful to the community at large and I think it tends to accentuate the differences, the very strong differences between the political parties,” he said.

He lamented that his opinions on the subject “have always been dissents and not commanded much attention in the community on the problems of political gerrymandering.”

In other Supreme Court news, click here for a writeup of a recent interview of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by NPR’s Nina Totenberg.

The highlights, as delivered by a couple of fellas who call themselves “Panel Nerds”:

• The night of Bush v. Gore, Scalia called to see if Ginsburg was alright. She wasn't. But the fact that he cared enough to call her demonstrates unseen inner workings of those who make up the highest court.
• Ginsburg says that the justices have dinner and drinks before the State of the Union address, so she sometimes needs a little help staying awake. "This year it was my colleague Justice Stephen Breyer . . .he was not as effective as my colleague Justice David Souter – at the first sign, he'd give me a solid pinch."
• Ginsburg shared a story (she would not reveal which case) in which she began writing the dissent for a 7-2 decision. By the time she finished, the decision was 6-3. And she was in the majority. She had changed 4 justices minds.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).