Tribute to Justice John Paul Stevens

It is an honor to pay tribute to a man who truly needs no tributes-Justice John Paul Stevens of the Class of 1947.Justice Stevens was born in 1920 here in Chicago, Illinois, and he graduated from Northwestern Law School sixty-four years ago with the highest grade point average ever earned up to that time in the history of the law school.He served on the United States Supreme Court from 1975 to 2010, when he retired at the age of ninety after the third-longest tenure in the Court's history.During his thirty-five years on the high court, he wrote many landmark opinions on subjects like the constitutionality of term limits, the line item veto, the death penalty, and the freedom of speech and of religion.Justice Stevens's opinion in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC 1 revolutionized the field of administrative law while his famous dissents in the flag burning case and in Bush v. Gore 2 inspired many critics of the Supreme Court.Justice Stevens's opinions were exceptionally well written and well crafted, and he enjoyed a sterling reputation as an intellectual leader on the Supreme Court.He started out strong in 1975, and, if anything, his opinions got even better in his last fifteen years on the Supreme Court.For all of my adult lifetime, Justice Stevens has been the gold standard for excelling in the art of being a Supreme Court Justice.He is quite simply, as one of my best conservative friends said, "a class act." 3 The ancient Greeks wrote that a good man is one who is wise, brave, moderate, and just.Justice Stevens exhibited all four of these virtues during his tenure on the Supreme Court.First, Justice Stevens exhibited wisdom by repeatedly exercising sound judgment in practical affairs.Justice Stevens was neither an abstract philosopher on the bench nor was he a Justice who was influenced by his emotions rather than by his mind.Practical wisdom is the virtue of having common sense and foresight, of being able to weigh competing values and give each of them their due.Justice Stevens exhibited practical wisdom, in my view, when he wrote majority opinions for the Court striking down state-imposed term limits on members of Congress 4 and a statutorily conferred line item veto for the President.5 Justice Stevens reached the right result in those two cases by looking forward and by * Class of 1940