American Philosophical Society
Member History

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1Name:  The Honorable John Paul Stevens
 Institution:  United States Supreme Court
 Year Elected:  2008
 Class:  5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs
 Subdivision:  502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Deceased
 Birth Date:  1920
 Death Date:  July 16, 2019
   
 
John Paul Stevens served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 19, 1975 until his retirement on June 29, 2010. For more than three decades he was one of the shaping architects of American constitutional law. However, he was not always law-directed. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, he was an English major, but following service as a naval officer in World War II, he turned to law. After graduating from Northwestern Law School in 1947, Stevens served as law clerk to Justice Wiley B. Rutledge during the Supreme Court's 1947-48 term. Following the clerkship, Stevens practiced law in Chicago for some twenty years, with a two-year Washington detour as counsel to a congressional committee. In 1970, President Nixon appointed Stevens a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In 1975, President Ford named Stevens to the Supreme Court, thereby returning him, as a Justice, to the courthouse where, as a law clerk, he had apprenticed almost thirty years before. John Paul Stevens was the senior Justice, having been a member of the Court for just under thirty-five years. On a Court which moved to the right, Stevens stayed in place: rock-solid for the maintenance of constitutional rights, and - as a steadfast adherent of the Constitution's separation of powers - a strong voice against undue accretion of the authority of the executive branch. Animating Stevens's jurisprudence is a set of perspectives that may be thought to trace back to his undergraduate concentration in English. In a 1992 lecture entitled The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction, Stevens wrote: "As times change there is…a fluctuation in perceptions about the importance of studying humanistic values and their relation to rules of law. Nevertheless, a society that is determined and destined to remain free must find time to nourish these values." John Paul Stevens was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. His memoir Five Chiefs was published in 2011 and in 2012 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama. He died July 16, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the age of 99.
 
Election Year
2008 (1)