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Justice Stevens had spent much of his service on the court in the shadow of more readily definable colleagues when he emerged as a central figure during a crucial period of the court’s history: The last phase of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s tenure and the early years under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
It was a time when the court took an active role in balancing individual liberty and national security and in policing the constitutional separation of powers, asserting a muscular brand of judicial authority that was welcomed by neither the White House nor Congress.
Societal debates over the rights of gay men and lesbians, the role of race, private property rights, environmental regulation and the separation of church and state also made their way onto the Supreme Court’s docket, and Justice Stevens, a soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, was as surprised as anyone to find himself not only taking the liberal side but also becoming its ardent champion.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the court’s majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush, in 2004, which brought within the jurisdiction of the federal courts the hundreds of prisoners who had been captured as enemy combatants during the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and held at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in 2006, which repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put some of those detainees on trial by military commissions. “The Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction,” he declared.
On the domestic side, in 2002, it was Justice Stevens who wrote the opinion in Atkins v. Virginia, declaring that the Constitution does not permit executing the mentally disabled. Such defendants “face a special risk of wrongful execution,” he said, because of their limited ability to understand their actions and participate in their own defense.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that case provided an example of how deeply divided the court was during those years on both methodology and outcomes. He complained that the 6-to-3 majority had simply enshrined its own views as constitutional law. “The arrogance of this assumption of power takes one’s breath away,” Justice Scalia wrote.
Two years before that, Justice Stevens had his own turn at a bitter dissent, in Bush v. Gore, the case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election by stopping the Florida recount. Justice Stevens, one of four dissenters, said the court’s action “can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.”
He said that although the actual winner of the presidential election might remain unknown, “the identity of the loser is perfectly clear”: It was “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
As the senior associate justice, with the power to assign majority opinions whenever he was in the majority and the chief justice was in dissent, Justice Stevens was the field marshal for a series of decisions that achieved liberal victories late in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s tenure. He assigned opinions to others in favor of gay rights and affirmative action and kept for himself decisions that upheld the authority of the federal government in the face of what had appeared to be the unstoppable states’-rights tilt of the Rehnquist court’s federalism revolution.
Until this final period, Justice Stevens had been known to the public, if at all, primarily for the jaunty bow ties he usually wore. His reputation was that of a very smart, nonideological, slightly quirky loner who, if a case was decided by a vote of 8 to 1, was as likely as not to be the solitary dissenter, caring neither to lead nor to follow.
He became the senior associate justice in his 19th year on the court, upon the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994. The role, which he appeared to enjoy, heightened his visibility and showed the world what his colleagues already knew: that he was actually a strategic thinker and canny tactician whose genial personality and impressive analytic power could forge a path that might have appeared blocked by the sheer arithmetic of a majority that was well to his right.
His frequent dissenting opinions, he said, arose from a conviction that both the public and the law were best served when differing views were expressed and explained, rather than suppressed for the sake of surface collegiality.
The court’s ideological spectrum was quite different when John Paul Stevens arrived from the federal appeals court in Chicago in December 1975, named by President Gerald R. Ford to replace Justice Douglas, who had retired a month earlier. The liberal titans William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were still sitting. So was Lewis F. Powell Jr., an appointee of President Richard M. Nixon, who voted with the conservatives on criminal law issues but stoutly defended abortion rights.
Another colleague was Potter Stewart, the last of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s four Supreme Court appointees and, like Justice Stevens, a moderate Republican from the Midwest. Only five years apart in age despite Justice Stewart’s substantial seniority, the two men bonded. In a speech in 2004, Justice Stevens said that Justice Stewart, who retired in 1981 and died four years later, “probably had the keenest intellect of any judge with whom I have served.”
The court’s membership turned over completely and moved indisputably to the right during Justice Stevens’s long tenure on the bench. The extent to which it bridged two eras of Supreme Court history was underscored on Oct. 3, 2005, when he administered the oath of office to Chief Justice Roberts, a man 35 years his junior whom he had first met 25 years earlier, when Justice Stevens was the court’s most junior member and John Roberts was a law clerk.
But the emergence of John Paul Stevens as the court’s most liberal justice was not simply a result of standing still amid a shifting landscape. His own views changed over time, moving to the left, particularly on the death penalty and on questions of racially conscious government policies.
He was skeptical of such policies at first, voting with the conservatives in the 1978 Bakke case to invalidate an admissions program at a University of California medical school that had set aside 16 places for minority applicants out of an entering class of 100. The court ordered the medical school to admit Allan Bakke, the white applicant who had brought the case.
Two years later, when the Supreme Court upheld a set-aside program that reserved 10 percent of federal public works money for minority contractors, Justice Stevens was one of three dissenters, along with Justices Stewart and Rehnquist. In his dissenting opinion in that case, Fullilove v. Klutznick, he warned that the “slapdash statute,” as he described it, could become “a permanent source of justification for grants of special privileges.”
In 1989, he voted with the 6-to-3 majority that invalidated a 30 percent minority contracting set-aside program in the city of Richmond, Va. Justices Marshall, Brennan and Blackmun dissented, with Justice Blackmun commenting, “I never thought that I would live to see the day” when the former “cradle of the Old Confederacy” would adopt a plan to help its African-American residents overcome a legacy of discrimination, only to see the effort struck down by “this court, the supposed bastion of equality.”
Nonetheless, Justice Stevens’s nuanced separate opinion in that case, Richmond v. J.A. Croson Company, demonstrated that he had begun to distance himself from the court’s increasingly conservative center of gravity. He agreed that the Richmond ordinance had painted with too broad a brush. But he did not agree with the majority’s premise that “a racial classification is never permissible except as a remedy for a past wrong”; sometimes such a classification is permissible, he said, if it takes account of race as a policy tool for building a better future.
He had said as much in a dissenting opinion in 1986 in a case challenging a collective bargaining agreement that shielded African-American teachers against layoffs in a Michigan public school district. The agreement was meant to preserve a hard-won racial balance in an economically troubled district, where the recently hired minority teachers would have been most vulnerable to seniority-based layoffs.
The 5-to-4 majority in that case, Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, concluded that the policy violated the white teachers’ 14th Amendment right to equal protection. Justice Powell explained that there was no proof of past discrimination for which the policy could be justified as an appropriate remedy.
In dissent, Justice Stevens said the majority’s mistake was to look backward rather than forward. Rather than ask whether the policy could be justified “as a remedy for sins that were committed in the past,” he said, “I believe that we should first ask whether the board’s action advances the public interest in educating children for the future.”
In a speech in 2004, Justice Stevens reflected on the “especially close” relationship he had enjoyed with Justice Powell, despite their differences in the Wygant case. He recalled that as the case was about to be argued, it came up in casual conversation between them.
“We both remarked on the fact that our next affirmative action argument was in an ‘easy case,’” Justice Stevens said. “It was only later that we both learned that we thought it easy for opposite reasons.”
His views on the death penalty similarly evolved. He arrived at the Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, which invalidated every death penalty statute in the country. The urgent question was whether a new generation of statutes that most states had enacted in response to the Furman ruling would now meet the court’s approval.
In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the newly appointed Justice Stevens voted with the 5-to-4 majority to endorse the new approach, which required special procedures to “channel” the jury’s discretion and to allow the resumption of capital punishment.
With the passing years, however, Justice Stevens began to express deep concerns about how the death penalty was being administered. Recent evidence that “a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously” was “profoundly significant,” he told the American Bar Association in 2005, “because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice.”
Finally, in 2008, he renounced capital punishment expressly, declaring that the time had come to reconsider “the justification for the death penalty itself.” Too often, he said, court decisions and actions taken by states to justify the death penalty were “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.”
The case was Baze v. Rees, a constitutional challenge to Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection. A majority rejected the challenge, and Justice Stevens concurred in that result, writing that he felt bound to “respect precedents that remain a part of our law.” But he had made himself clear: in the court’s hands the death penalty had become, for him, a promise of fairness unfulfilled.
One plausible explanation for Justice Stevens’s growing affinity for the liberal side was his response to the polarizing discourse about the Supreme Court that emanated from the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. After Attorney General Edwin Meese III criticized a long series of Supreme Court precedents that had interpreted the Bill of Rights as binding not only on the federal government but on the states as well — a foundational premise of 20th-century constitutional law — Justice Stevens took him on directly. The attorney general, he said in a speech to the Federal Bar Association in Chicago in 1985, “overlooks the profound importance of the Civil War and the postwar amendments on the structure of our government.”
Justice Stevens’s own explanation for why his views had changed was simply that he had learned on the job. “I know that I, like most of my colleagues, have continued to participate in a learning process while serving on the bench,” he said in 2005 at a symposium held at Fordham University Law School to mark his 30th anniversary on the court and 35th year as a judge.
“Learning on the job is essential to the process of judging,” he continued. “At the very least, I know that learning on the bench has been one of the most important and rewarding aspects of my own experience over the last 35 years.”
Yet in another sense he did not change very much, remaining what he had been at the start of his judicial career: a judge who looked at the facts on the ground rather than theories in law review articles, one who tended to regard doctrinal debates as a distraction from a judge’s real work, which in his opinion was the application of judgment to the case at hand.
His distinctive approach to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection was perhaps the best example of his disdain for doctrinal formalism.
By the mid-1970s, the court had developed an elaborate grid for evaluating claims of unequal treatment at the hands of the government. Policies that distinguished among people based on their race were subject to “strict” judicial scrutiny and were almost never upheld. Policies that simply concerned economic interests were subject to minimal scrutiny and were upheld as long as they had a “rational basis.” Policies that treated men and women differently fell somewhere in between, subject to “heightened” judicial scrutiny and required to serve an “important governmental interest.”
Justice Stevens rejected all this. “There is only one Equal Protection Clause,” he declared in 1976, concurring in Craig v. Boren, an early sex discrimination case. “It requires every state to govern impartially.” A straightforward application of that principle was all a court needed, in his view, to decide an equal protection case.
One of Justice Stevens’s former clerks, Andrew M. Siegel, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, summed up the justice’s jurisprudence in a paper delivered at the 2005 Fordham symposium. “Perhaps the defining vision of Justice Stevens’s jurisprudence, indeed of his entire life project,” Professor Siegel wrote, “has been an unshakable faith in the capacity of men and women of the law to resolve difficult and contentious issues through the application of reason tempered by experience and humility.”
Professor William D. Popkin of the Indiana University School of Law wrote in a 1989 article in The Duke Law Journal that “a special brand of judicial restraint and creativity” marked Justice Stevens’s approach to the law. Justice Stevens was guided by three principles, Professor Popkin wrote: first, “deference to other decision makers,” based on the view that “the court should not decide cases that other institutions can decide at least as well or better”; second, attention to the facts of a case and avoidance of broad generalizations, based on the view that “the court should decide no more than the facts of the case require”; and third, the belief that the court’s highest substantive goal was to “protect individual dignity,” as reflected in his approach to equal protection.
Justice Stevens gave concrete application to his view of a limited role for the courts in one of his most important majority opinions, the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The court held that when a federal statute is ambiguous, judges should generally defer to the interpretation of the agency charged with administering that statute rather than impose their own views of what Congress must have or should have meant.
“Federal judges — who have no constituency — have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do,” Justice Stevens wrote. Although the case remained obscure to the general public, it was a landmark of administrative law, and the term “Chevron deference” became a commonplace in judicial decisions reviewing a seemingly endless array of federal regulations. For the rest of his career, Justice Stevens looked back on the Chevron case with fondness and pride.
But while believing that judicial deference was often appropriate, he also believed that the federal courts must be available when other institutions of government failed to do their jobs. “I firmly believe that the Framers of the Constitution expected and intended the vast open spaces in our charter of government to be filled not only by legislative enactment but also by the common-law process of step-by-step adjudication,” he said in a 1991 speech at the University of Chicago.
It was a time when the court took an active role in balancing individual liberty and national security and in policing the constitutional separation of powers, asserting a muscular brand of judicial authority that was welcomed by neither the White House nor Congress.
Societal debates over the rights of gay men and lesbians, the role of race, private property rights, environmental regulation and the separation of church and state also made their way onto the Supreme Court’s docket, and Justice Stevens, a soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, was as surprised as anyone to find himself not only taking the liberal side but also becoming its ardent champion.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the court’s majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush, in 2004, which brought within the jurisdiction of the federal courts the hundreds of prisoners who had been captured as enemy combatants during the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and held at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
It was Justice Stevens who wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in 2006, which repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put some of those detainees on trial by military commissions. “The Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction,” he declared.
On the domestic side, in 2002, it was Justice Stevens who wrote the opinion in Atkins v. Virginia, declaring that the Constitution does not permit executing the mentally disabled. Such defendants “face a special risk of wrongful execution,” he said, because of their limited ability to understand their actions and participate in their own defense.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in that case provided an example of how deeply divided the court was during those years on both methodology and outcomes. He complained that the 6-to-3 majority had simply enshrined its own views as constitutional law. “The arrogance of this assumption of power takes one’s breath away,” Justice Scalia wrote.
Two years before that, Justice Stevens had his own turn at a bitter dissent, in Bush v. Gore, the case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election by stopping the Florida recount. Justice Stevens, one of four dissenters, said the court’s action “can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.”
He said that although the actual winner of the presidential election might remain unknown, “the identity of the loser is perfectly clear”: It was “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
As the senior associate justice, with the power to assign majority opinions whenever he was in the majority and the chief justice was in dissent, Justice Stevens was the field marshal for a series of decisions that achieved liberal victories late in Chief Justice Rehnquist’s tenure. He assigned opinions to others in favor of gay rights and affirmative action and kept for himself decisions that upheld the authority of the federal government in the face of what had appeared to be the unstoppable states’-rights tilt of the Rehnquist court’s federalism revolution.
Until this final period, Justice Stevens had been known to the public, if at all, primarily for the jaunty bow ties he usually wore. His reputation was that of a very smart, nonideological, slightly quirky loner who, if a case was decided by a vote of 8 to 1, was as likely as not to be the solitary dissenter, caring neither to lead nor to follow.
He became the senior associate justice in his 19th year on the court, upon the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994. The role, which he appeared to enjoy, heightened his visibility and showed the world what his colleagues already knew: that he was actually a strategic thinker and canny tactician whose genial personality and impressive analytic power could forge a path that might have appeared blocked by the sheer arithmetic of a majority that was well to his right.
His frequent dissenting opinions, he said, arose from a conviction that both the public and the law were best served when differing views were expressed and explained, rather than suppressed for the sake of surface collegiality.
The court’s ideological spectrum was quite different when John Paul Stevens arrived from the federal appeals court in Chicago in December 1975, named by President Gerald R. Ford to replace Justice Douglas, who had retired a month earlier. The liberal titans William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were still sitting. So was Lewis F. Powell Jr., an appointee of President Richard M. Nixon, who voted with the conservatives on criminal law issues but stoutly defended abortion rights.
Another colleague was Potter Stewart, the last of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s four Supreme Court appointees and, like Justice Stevens, a moderate Republican from the Midwest. Only five years apart in age despite Justice Stewart’s substantial seniority, the two men bonded. In a speech in 2004, Justice Stevens said that Justice Stewart, who retired in 1981 and died four years later, “probably had the keenest intellect of any judge with whom I have served.”
The court’s membership turned over completely and moved indisputably to the right during Justice Stevens’s long tenure on the bench. The extent to which it bridged two eras of Supreme Court history was underscored on Oct. 3, 2005, when he administered the oath of office to Chief Justice Roberts, a man 35 years his junior whom he had first met 25 years earlier, when Justice Stevens was the court’s most junior member and John Roberts was a law clerk.
But the emergence of John Paul Stevens as the court’s most liberal justice was not simply a result of standing still amid a shifting landscape. His own views changed over time, moving to the left, particularly on the death penalty and on questions of racially conscious government policies.
He was skeptical of such policies at first, voting with the conservatives in the 1978 Bakke case to invalidate an admissions program at a University of California medical school that had set aside 16 places for minority applicants out of an entering class of 100. The court ordered the medical school to admit Allan Bakke, the white applicant who had brought the case.
Two years later, when the Supreme Court upheld a set-aside program that reserved 10 percent of federal public works money for minority contractors, Justice Stevens was one of three dissenters, along with Justices Stewart and Rehnquist. In his dissenting opinion in that case, Fullilove v. Klutznick, he warned that the “slapdash statute,” as he described it, could become “a permanent source of justification for grants of special privileges.”
In 1989, he voted with the 6-to-3 majority that invalidated a 30 percent minority contracting set-aside program in the city of Richmond, Va. Justices Marshall, Brennan and Blackmun dissented, with Justice Blackmun commenting, “I never thought that I would live to see the day” when the former “cradle of the Old Confederacy” would adopt a plan to help its African-American residents overcome a legacy of discrimination, only to see the effort struck down by “this court, the supposed bastion of equality.”
Nonetheless, Justice Stevens’s nuanced separate opinion in that case, Richmond v. J.A. Croson Company, demonstrated that he had begun to distance himself from the court’s increasingly conservative center of gravity. He agreed that the Richmond ordinance had painted with too broad a brush. But he did not agree with the majority’s premise that “a racial classification is never permissible except as a remedy for a past wrong”; sometimes such a classification is permissible, he said, if it takes account of race as a policy tool for building a better future.
He had said as much in a dissenting opinion in 1986 in a case challenging a collective bargaining agreement that shielded African-American teachers against layoffs in a Michigan public school district. The agreement was meant to preserve a hard-won racial balance in an economically troubled district, where the recently hired minority teachers would have been most vulnerable to seniority-based layoffs.
The 5-to-4 majority in that case, Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, concluded that the policy violated the white teachers’ 14th Amendment right to equal protection. Justice Powell explained that there was no proof of past discrimination for which the policy could be justified as an appropriate remedy.
In dissent, Justice Stevens said the majority’s mistake was to look backward rather than forward. Rather than ask whether the policy could be justified “as a remedy for sins that were committed in the past,” he said, “I believe that we should first ask whether the board’s action advances the public interest in educating children for the future.”
In a speech in 2004, Justice Stevens reflected on the “especially close” relationship he had enjoyed with Justice Powell, despite their differences in the Wygant case. He recalled that as the case was about to be argued, it came up in casual conversation between them.
“We both remarked on the fact that our next affirmative action argument was in an ‘easy case,’” Justice Stevens said. “It was only later that we both learned that we thought it easy for opposite reasons.”
His views on the death penalty similarly evolved. He arrived at the Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, which invalidated every death penalty statute in the country. The urgent question was whether a new generation of statutes that most states had enacted in response to the Furman ruling would now meet the court’s approval.
In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the newly appointed Justice Stevens voted with the 5-to-4 majority to endorse the new approach, which required special procedures to “channel” the jury’s discretion and to allow the resumption of capital punishment.
With the passing years, however, Justice Stevens began to express deep concerns about how the death penalty was being administered. Recent evidence that “a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously” was “profoundly significant,” he told the American Bar Association in 2005, “because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice.”
Finally, in 2008, he renounced capital punishment expressly, declaring that the time had come to reconsider “the justification for the death penalty itself.” Too often, he said, court decisions and actions taken by states to justify the death penalty were “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.”
The case was Baze v. Rees, a constitutional challenge to Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection. A majority rejected the challenge, and Justice Stevens concurred in that result, writing that he felt bound to “respect precedents that remain a part of our law.” But he had made himself clear: in the court’s hands the death penalty had become, for him, a promise of fairness unfulfilled.
One plausible explanation for Justice Stevens’s growing affinity for the liberal side was his response to the polarizing discourse about the Supreme Court that emanated from the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. After Attorney General Edwin Meese III criticized a long series of Supreme Court precedents that had interpreted the Bill of Rights as binding not only on the federal government but on the states as well — a foundational premise of 20th-century constitutional law — Justice Stevens took him on directly. The attorney general, he said in a speech to the Federal Bar Association in Chicago in 1985, “overlooks the profound importance of the Civil War and the postwar amendments on the structure of our government.”
Justice Stevens’s own explanation for why his views had changed was simply that he had learned on the job. “I know that I, like most of my colleagues, have continued to participate in a learning process while serving on the bench,” he said in 2005 at a symposium held at Fordham University Law School to mark his 30th anniversary on the court and 35th year as a judge.
“Learning on the job is essential to the process of judging,” he continued. “At the very least, I know that learning on the bench has been one of the most important and rewarding aspects of my own experience over the last 35 years.”
Yet in another sense he did not change very much, remaining what he had been at the start of his judicial career: a judge who looked at the facts on the ground rather than theories in law review articles, one who tended to regard doctrinal debates as a distraction from a judge’s real work, which in his opinion was the application of judgment to the case at hand.
His distinctive approach to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection was perhaps the best example of his disdain for doctrinal formalism.
By the mid-1970s, the court had developed an elaborate grid for evaluating claims of unequal treatment at the hands of the government. Policies that distinguished among people based on their race were subject to “strict” judicial scrutiny and were almost never upheld. Policies that simply concerned economic interests were subject to minimal scrutiny and were upheld as long as they had a “rational basis.” Policies that treated men and women differently fell somewhere in between, subject to “heightened” judicial scrutiny and required to serve an “important governmental interest.”
Justice Stevens rejected all this. “There is only one Equal Protection Clause,” he declared in 1976, concurring in Craig v. Boren, an early sex discrimination case. “It requires every state to govern impartially.” A straightforward application of that principle was all a court needed, in his view, to decide an equal protection case.
One of Justice Stevens’s former clerks, Andrew M. Siegel, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, summed up the justice’s jurisprudence in a paper delivered at the 2005 Fordham symposium. “Perhaps the defining vision of Justice Stevens’s jurisprudence, indeed of his entire life project,” Professor Siegel wrote, “has been an unshakable faith in the capacity of men and women of the law to resolve difficult and contentious issues through the application of reason tempered by experience and humility.”
Professor William D. Popkin of the Indiana University School of Law wrote in a 1989 article in The Duke Law Journal that “a special brand of judicial restraint and creativity” marked Justice Stevens’s approach to the law. Justice Stevens was guided by three principles, Professor Popkin wrote: first, “deference to other decision makers,” based on the view that “the court should not decide cases that other institutions can decide at least as well or better”; second, attention to the facts of a case and avoidance of broad generalizations, based on the view that “the court should decide no more than the facts of the case require”; and third, the belief that the court’s highest substantive goal was to “protect individual dignity,” as reflected in his approach to equal protection.
Justice Stevens gave concrete application to his view of a limited role for the courts in one of his most important majority opinions, the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The court held that when a federal statute is ambiguous, judges should generally defer to the interpretation of the agency charged with administering that statute rather than impose their own views of what Congress must have or should have meant.
“Federal judges — who have no constituency — have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do,” Justice Stevens wrote. Although the case remained obscure to the general public, it was a landmark of administrative law, and the term “Chevron deference” became a commonplace in judicial decisions reviewing a seemingly endless array of federal regulations. For the rest of his career, Justice Stevens looked back on the Chevron case with fondness and pride.
But while believing that judicial deference was often appropriate, he also believed that the federal courts must be available when other institutions of government failed to do their jobs. “I firmly believe that the Framers of the Constitution expected and intended the vast open spaces in our charter of government to be filled not only by legislative enactment but also by the common-law process of step-by-step adjudication,” he said in a 1991 speech at the University of Chicago.
