There is a fascinating interview with newly retired Justice Stevens on the NPR site. Stevens is an active 90 year old who plays tennis several times a week and who spent 35 years on the Supreme Court. Today was the official first day of retirement since the current Supreme Court recess was over. Stevens was appointed by President Gerald Ford.
The interview includes the scope of Steven’s life experiences, where he sits watching Babe Ruth hit a homer during the 1932 World Series against the Cubs to his throwing out the first pitch of a Cubs game when he was 85 years old.
From the NPR interview:
A Fundamental Dispute
Stevens and Scalia have gone at each other on many subjects, but their core disagreement is over Scalia’s espousal of originalism — the idea that the Founding Fathers intended the Constitution to mean only what it meant at the time of enactment, no more and no less. Or, as Scalia puts it, “the Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead.”
Stevens disagrees. “To suggest that the law is static is quite wrong,” he says. Stevens argues that “the whole purpose was to form a more perfect union, not something that’s perfect when we started. We designed a system of government that would contemplate a change and progress.”
This clash of views is exemplified in a 1990 opinion Stevens wrote, which invalidated the Illinois patronage system as a violation of employees’ First Amendment rights to freedom of association.
Stevens notes that when he first encountered the question, he thought the claim had no merit. After all, as Justice Scalia would subsequently observe, patronage existed at the time the republic was founded. But Stevens, upon examining the question, reached a conclusion exactly opposite of what he originally thought.
