Sheridan: Con-Law

CROSS ON PUBLIC PARK LAND

The decision in Salazar v. Buono is reported in the NYT, below.  What I don't get is how the prime symbol of one faith is endorsed as the symbol of military sacrifice for the nation, given the many different faiths, and none, held by the population of over 300 million. To claim that the cross of Christianity is a meaningless symbol acceptable to people of other faiths does a disservice to Christians.  To force what others see as a Christian symbol upon non-Christians does a disservice to them.

Some Christians claim that removing Christian symbols, such as the cross, or "Under God," or "In God We Trust" from the pledge and the coins dis-respects their belief that the symbols which they revere should stand.

Given that the nation is supposed not to have an established religion, I have trouble seeing an established cross, or such sayings, when imposed on the rest of the population, as being consistent with the First Amendment's anti-Establishment of religion clause.

---

April 28, 2010

Justices’ Ruling Blocks Cross Removal

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — A badly fractured Supreme Court, with six justices writing opinions, re-opened the possibility on Wednesday that a large cross serving as a war memorial in a remote part of the Mojave desert may be permitted to remain there.

The 5-to-4 decision provided an unusually vivid glimpse into how deeply divided the court is on the role that religious symbols may play in public life and, in particular, the meanings conveyed by crosses in memorials for fallen soldiers.

“A Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a plurality opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies would be compounded if the fallen are forgotten.”

Justice John Paul Stevens rejected that view. “The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice,” he wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. “It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.”

The disagreement recalled perhaps the most heated exchange of the term, from the argument in the case in October.

Peter J. Eliasberg, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said many Jewish war veterans would not want to be honored by “the predominant symbol of Christianity,” one that “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins.”

Justice Antonin Scalia responded that the symbol in the context of a war memorial carries a more universal meaning. “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.,” he said.

Mr. Eliasberg said “there is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew,” and there was laughter in the courtroom.

Justice Scalia, who is usually jovial even in disagreement, turned angry. “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead,” he said. “I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

Illuminating though it was, Wednesday’s decision in the case, Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472, settled very little. It did overturn a trial court’s order rejecting a Congressional solution to an earlier ruling that had said the cross, which stands on federal land, conveyed the constitutionally impermissible message of government endorsement of religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. But the Supreme Court did not rule on the solution itself, and instead returned the case to the lower courts for reconsideration.

The first ruling, on the core First Amendment question, was not before the Supreme Court. Instead, the justices considered a federal law enacted in reaction to the first ruling. The law called for the government to transfer to private hands the acre of land on which the cross sits. In a second round of litigation, the lower courts ruled that the law was an unlawful attempt to evade the first ruling.

Justice Kennedy wrote that those recent decisions were too glib in failing to consider the government’s dilemma.

“It could not maintain the cross without violating the injunction,” he wrote of the government, “but it could not remove the cross without conveying disrespect for those the cross was seen as honoring.

“The land transfer-statute embodies Congress’s legislative judgment that this dispute is best resolved through a framework and policy of accommodation for a symbol that, while challenged under the Establishment Clause, has complex meanings beyond the expression of religious views.”

But Justice Kennedy, in a portion of his opinion joined only by Chief Justice Roberts, did not uphold the land-transfer law outright. Instead, the court sent the case back to the trial court for another look in light of the analysis in Wednesday’s decision.

NO SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS

Well, they may not be citizens, but do we really want to establish a permanent underclass in this country?

Haven't we tried, and regretted, doing that with people enslaved because of their race and, after being freed as the result of a terrible Civil War that cost 600,000 lives, all sides and civilians, then subjected them to Jim Crow by force of law and the KKK?

The Supreme Court, faced with the policy decision as to whether permanently to consign the children of undocumented Mexicans in Texas to illiterate status by depriving them of a free, public education, decided not to create a permanent underclass of juvenile delinquents in the case of Plyler v. Doe.

Linda Greenhouse uses the decision to show how the new Arizona law authorizing local police to query individuals suspected of not being legally in the United States and then arrest them if they cannot prove their legal status here, risks terrorizing people afraid to come into contact with authorities.  Thus, a person involved in an automobile accident, a domestic violence incident, a health emergency, becomes afraid to seek protection from the authorities for fear of being deported.  Commentators have likened it to being a resident of Nazi Germany.

Here's the Greenhouse column:

April 26, 2010, 8:44 pm

Breathing While Undocumented

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law.

Tags:

Arizona, boycotts, immigration, John G. Roberts Jr., laws, Supreme Court

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

The intent of the new Arizona law, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.” Breathing while undocumented, without a civil liberties lawyer at hand, is now a perilous activity anywhere in Arizona.

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, has already called on the nation’s business community to protest the law by withholding its convention business. Such boycotts can be effective, as demonstrated in the late-1980s when the loss not only of convention business but of — horrors! — the Super Bowl prompted Arizona voters to reinstate a Martin Luther King holiday in the state.

But a boycott is a blunt instrument that can hurt innocent business owners and their employees. So I will stick to my own personal protest without presuming to urge anyone else to follow my example.

Rather, I’ll offer a reflection on how, a generation ago, another of the country’s periodic anti-immigrant spasms was handled by the Supreme Court. In 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children — a good number of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then — faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future.

The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case, Plyler v. Doe, reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major debate within his administration over whether to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the admirable solicitor general, refused to do so.

In June 1982, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. The law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents,” he wrote.

I have no doubt that but for that ruling, public school systems all over the country would be checking papers and tossing away their undocumented students like so much playground litter. Blocked from that approach, local governments now try others. The city of Hazleton, Pa., passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal district judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government, not of Hazleton, Pa.

Indeed, federal pre-emption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.

My confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case, a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.

So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.

Correction:
An earlier version of this Op-Ed essay referred incorrectly to the provisions of the new Arizona immigration statute. The version of the bill signed by the governor no longer includes a section under which undocumented immigrants would be guilty of trespassing for being on Arizona soil.

• Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

JUDGE & DA SLEEPING TOGETHER

Defense attorneys often think they're facing two prosecutors, the one at counsel table and the other on the bench.  It would be embarrassing to find that the judge and the DA were in bed together literally, not just figuratively.  Worse if it were a death penalty prosecution and your client wound up with death.

Foul!

Right?

Maybe, but not in Texas.

Dahlia Lithwick, one of the most perceptive law writers anywhere, tells the story.  I love her tag-line that this system hurts more than the accused.  It hurts the rest of us who continue to live in the same system.

Avoiding responsibility for prosecuting the innocent is not confined to Texas.  It's just that in Texas they seem to care even less.

jurisprudence

Courting Disaster

The most outrageous thing about the Texas judge who slept with the prosecutor in a death-penalty case.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, April 24, 2010, at 7:05 AM ET

---

When the U.S. Supreme Court denied Charles Dean Hood's appeal last week, it was done in a one-sentence, unsigned order. Hood is a Texas death-row inmate who was convicted of murdering two people in 1990. Long after the conclusion of the trial, it became clear that his trial judge and prosecutor had been secretly involved in a years-long extramarital affair. Because they were both married, they denied the affair—even to Hood's death-penalty lawyers. After the clandestine relationship finally came to light, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Hood's challenge in two curt sentences last September, finding that his lawyers had waited too long to raise the issue on appeal. How Hood was to have raised the conflict of interest when the existence of the affair was not conclusively established until 2008, when the judge and prosecutor were forced to admit it under oath, is not explained.

Hood has already been granted a new sentencing hearing because the Texas appeals court has acknowledged that the jury instructions were improper, but prosecutors say they will again seek the death penalty. In any event, resentencing Hood doesn't resolve the fundamental problem with the case. The issue here is whether any reasonable person would believe that a criminal trial at which one's prosecutor and judge are secretly in love could ever be fair. And that's the issue the courts keep refusing to address.

Last year, the Supreme Court handed down a blockbuster opinion in Caperton v. Massey, a case testing whether a justice on West Virginia's highest court should have recused himself from hearing an appeal in which one of the parties—Don Blankenship of A.T. Massey Coal Co.—had just donated $3 million to his judicial election campaign. Writing for a sharply divided 5–4 court, Justice Anthony Kennedy called the appearance of a conflict of interest in this case so "extreme" that the judge's failure to recuse himself undermined the constitutional right to due process. The Hood appeal to the Supreme Court essentially asked whether a judge might be as compromised by great sex as by big money. In his filings, Hood argued that the trial judge's "long-term, intimate sexual relationship and later close friendship with [the prosecutor] attuned her to his professional and personal interests and made those interests her own." Hood said that unlike the Caperton case, in which Blankenship's financial support of the judge was a matter of public knowledge, the Texas judge was more compromised because she kept her relationship a secret.

If the facts of the Caperton case were sufficiently shocking to become a John Grisham novel, the facts of Hood's trial would make a sizzling movie for Lifetime. You don't even have to take a position on Hood's guilt, innocence, or the efficacy of the death penalty to recognize that when a judge and prosecutor are secret paramours, the integrity of the whole judicial system suffers. Texas law requires a judge's recusal whenever "his impartiality might reasonably be questioned" or if "he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning the subject matter or a party." The test here isn't whether the judge thinks she's biased (although Hood's judge later admitted she should have recused herself). It's a constitutional "ick" test: How bad does the conflict of interest look?

The facts of Hood's case look very bad. That's why his appeal to the Supreme Court was supported by 30 top legal ethicists and an array of high-profile judges and prosecutors, including former FBI Director William Sessions and former Texas Governor and Attorney General Mark White, who supports capital punishment.

I n his compelling new book, The Autobiography of an Execution, Texas death-penalty lawyer David Dow condemns a system of capital punishment built on evading responsibility at every stage of litigation: Jurors duck behind other jurors. Judges take refuge behind jury verdicts. The appeals courts wordlessly affirm the trial judge. Then the Supreme Court hangs out a sign that says GONE FISHIN'. Since everyone is fairly certain the accused probably killed someone, the fact that along the line an injustice may have occurred just doesn't matter. But if you believe that a one-sentence disposition of his case is more justice than a Charles Hood deserves, you're still asking the wrong question. Hood may be sentenced to die in a justice system where outrageous judicial bias merits only a sentence. The rest of us have to go on living in it.

A version of this article also appears in Newsweek.

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2251663/

EIRing TO DEATH

Article:S.F. supes knock down plan for new condo tower:/c/a/2010/04/20/BA141D1OL7.DTL

Article:S.F. supes knock down plan for new condo tower:/c/a/2010/04/20/BA141D1OL7.DTL

EIR power can kill a real estate development project, as the article below shows.  Whether this is good or bad depends on which side of the project you're on, the developer or the Nimby folk (for Not in my backyard). 

What's so difficult about writing an environmental impact report you might wonder?  In the case described below, a 430' tall, 38-story high-rise development in downtown San Francisco, the developer has already spent $6 million.  A supplemental EIR  to the one already done would cost another $1 million.

Here's the game:  No matter what the existing EIR reports on, it hasn't reported on enough, for example:

1. the creation of new shadows,
   
2. wind tunnels,
   
3. the effect on migrating birds,
   
4. the fate of nearby redwood trees,
   
5. traffic and
   
6. visual aesthetics.
7. "It doesn't acknowledge the significant cumulative impacts of wind, of shadows, on transportation, on parking, on transit, on aesthetics."

What's missing?  Endangered species, feng shui?

"Growth-control proponents cast the project as being out of character for the location and one that would upset years of carefully crafted city planning policy.

But supporters said it would be a chance to create more housing near where people work, spark new life in the neighborhood and add to the city's public park system. Backers include the Neighborhood Parks Council and the building trades hungry for construction opportunities."

Developers need votes as much as land and money.

This developer has thrown up his hands after losing 10-0 in the vote department.  He says he's abandoning the project after his proposal to cut the height down to 200' was rejected.

$6 million, down the drain.

What could he have done differently before spending the money, I wonder?  Count the votes?  Anticipate the opposition? Make friends with a lot of politicians?  Hire a consultant who'd run the campaigns for some of the politicians?

Tricky business, which makes one wonder how we acquired all the high-rise buildings in San Francisco that we have.  Someone must've had the key.  My guess it was good connections with a powerful mayor, someone who appointed members of the various commissions required to approve a project.

S.F. supes knock down plan for new condo tower

Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

(04-20) 21:44 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A developer's plan to erect a 38-story condominium tower next to San Francisco's landmark Transamerica Pyramid was knocked down by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday night.

After nearing five hours of public testimony from dozens of speakers on both sides of the debate, the board voted 10-0 to overturn the Planning Commission's determination last month that the project's environmental impact report was adequate, accurate and complete.

"This EIR is fatally flawed," said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. "It doesn't acknowledge the significant cumulative impacts of wind, of shadows, on transportation, on parking, on transit, on aesthetics,"

The supervisors' rejection of the environmental impact report doesn't by itself kill the proposed project at 555 Washington St. But the developer, Andrew Segal, said he does not plan to go forward.

"If we have to recirculate the EIR, I think we're done," Segal said.

He said a revised analysis would add $1 million to the $6 million the developer already has spent.

He threw the board an end-of-the-game Hail Mary by offering to cut down the size of the tower from 430 feet to 200 feet, which would comply with the allowable height limit in the neighborhood.

Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier's request that the board continue consideration for another month to give city planners time to review the scaled-down plan failed.

Supervisor David Campos said the developer should have come forward earlier with the alternative plan when opposition was percolating - and before the environmental review was finalized.

Among the project opponents were the Sierra Club, San Francisco Tomorrow and Aaron Peskin, the former president of the Board of Supervisors who got his political start in the city's development wars. They said the state-mandated environmental impact study submitted by the developer did not adequately address such issues as the creation of new shadows, wind tunnels, the effect on migrating birds, the fate of nearby redwood trees, traffic and visual aesthetics.

"The Telegraph Hill Dwellers and San Franciscans for Reasonable Growth appealed the Planning Commission's decision to the Board of Supervisors.

The proposed development emerged as one of the most contentious in recent years.

Growth-control proponents cast the project as being out of character for the location and one that would upset years of carefully crafted city planning policy.

But supporters said it would be a chance to create more housing near where people work, spark new life in the neighborhood and add to the city's public park system. Backers include the Neighborhood Parks Council and the building trades hungry for construction opportunities.

Neighborhood groups in the vicinity were split over the proposed 248-unit high-rise.

The tower would cast shadows on parts of two public parks, Maritime Plaza and Sue Bierman Park, which runs counter to city policy.

In return, the developer planned to expand Redwood Park, a privately owned park next to the Transamerica Pyramid, and turn it over to the city for public use.

E-mail Rachel Gordon at rgordon@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/21/BA141D1OL7.DTL

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

JUSTICE JOHN PAUL STEVENS

Justice John Paul Stevens to Retire From Supreme Court

A Liberal Voice for 34 Years, Stevens Clears Way for Obama's Second Nomination

By ARIANE de VOGUE

April 9, 2010

Justice John Paul Stevens, 89, who served on the high court for a near record breaking 34 years, announced his retirement today, giving President Barack Obama his second chance to name a Supreme Court justice.

"Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice," Stevens wrote in a letter to the president, stating his retirement would be "effective the next day after the Court rises for the summer recess this year."

The last day of oral arguments is April 28 and the last day of the court will be sometime in the last week of June.

The announcement comes 11 days before Stevens' 90th birthday. When he turns 90, Stevens will be only the second Supreme Court Justice to pass such a milestone on the bench.

The departure of the soft spoken, unfailingly polite Midwesterner leaves the president under pressure to nominate a replacement who will deliver the same consistently liberal votes on the major social issues of the day.

Chief Justice John Roberts praised Stevens, saying in a statement that Roberts has "enriched the lives of everyone at the Court through his intellect, independence, and warm grace. We have all been blessed to have John as our colleague and his wife Maryan as our friend."

Although nominated by Republican President Gerald Ford in 1975, Stevens became a hero to liberals voting to limit the use of the death penalty, uphold affirmative action, broaden the core holding of Roe v. Wade and argue for a strict separation of church and state.

But Stevens might be best known for his dissent in Bush v. Gore, the controversial Supreme Court decision that halted a recount of Florida ballots and cleared the way for George W. Bush to take the presidency.

"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear," Stevens wrote. "It is the nation's confidence in the judge as the impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Stevens was known as a keen tactician on the court. Because he was the senior justice on the liberal side of the bench, he had the authority to assign cases when the chief justice was voting on the other side.

Stevens used this authority strategically, sometimes assigning himself the big decisions, but other times working with an undecided justice hoping to bring him or her to his side of the argument.

He once told law professor Jeffrey Rosen, "In all candor, if you think somebody might not be solid...it might be wiser to let that person write the opinion."

John Paul Stevens on the Issues

Abortion: Stevens was not yet on the court when Roe v. Wade, the opinion that legalized abortion, was decided, but he later voted to reaffirm its core holding in Casey v. Pennsylvania.

Affirmative Action: In 2003, he voted to uphold the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School which took race into consideration in its admissions process. Stevens told an audience at Fordham College in 2006, "With respect to the constitutionality of affirmative action, we have learned that justifications based on past sins may be less persuasive than those predicated on anticipated future benefits."

Death Penalty: During his career on the high court, Stevens came full circle on the issue of the death penalty. In 1976, he voted to reinstate the use of the death penalty but 32 years later, he dropped a bombshell: he had come to believe the death penalty was unconstitutional.

In Baze v. Rees (2008) he wrote: "I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes."

Before this revelation, he wrote Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which ended the death penalty for mentally retarded criminals, and voted to strike down the death penalty for juvenile offenders.

Campaign Finance: Stevens authored a withering dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 5-4 decision that invalidated decades old federal legislation restricting corporate spending in poltical campaigns.

Stevens read his dissent from the bench shredding the majority's reasoning, saying "at bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt."

Gay rights: In 2003, Stevens assigned Justice Anthony Kennedy to write Lawrence v. Taylor, the landmark gay rights case striking down a criminal ban on gay consensual sex. In his opinion, Kennedy relied heavily on a dissent Stevens had written years earlier in an opinion upholding an anti-gay law.

Internet: In Sony v. Universal Studios, he wrote the decision that found consumers do not violate federal copyright law when they tape TV programs with their video cassette recorders.

Flag Burning: Stevens didn't always express a liberal view in his opinions. In 1989, Stevens, who won a Bronze Star in World War II, wrote a strong dissent in a decision that upheld a protester's right to burn the American flag. Stevens said, "Sanctioning the public desecration of the flag will tarnish its value -- both for those who cherish the ideas for which it waves and for those who desire to don the robes of martyrdom by burning it."

National Security: In Rasul v. Bush, Stevens struck a blow to the Bush administration's take on executive power when he said that federal courts have the jurisdiction to hear challenges to foreign nationals being held in Guantanamo Bay. "In national security cases under the second Bush administration, Guantanamo-type cases, he was very strong in ruling against what he said were excessive uses of presidential power and in expanding judicial power in the national security area," said National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor.

Stevens: A Judicial Conservative?

In the few interviews the justice has granted over the years, he has steadfastly maintained that he is a judicial conservative, despite his liberal votes. He suggests that he hasn't changed, but the court became more conservative.

"I see myself as a conservative, to tell you the truth," he told ABC in 2007, just after the death of Gerald R. Ford, the president who nominated him.

In that interview, Stevens expressed his admiration for Ford, saying, "I have to tell you I was amazed to find how intelligent he was; right away, I realized I was talking to a very sound, good lawyer, which is kind of contrary to the image he portrayed to the press as sort of being a klutz or something. He was anything but. He was a charming, decent guy."

As for Ford, until his death, he maintained how proud he was of his decision to name Stevens to the court. In 2005, Ford sent a letter to the Fordham Law School which said, in part, that Stevens, "served his nation well, at all times carrying out his judicial duties with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns.

"Justice Stevens has made me, and our fellow citizens, proud of my three-decade-old decision to appoint him to the Supreme Court," Ford wrote. Stevens has the letter framed in his chambers.

Stevens was born in Chicago in April 1920 to a wealthy South Side family. His father owned the famed Stevens Hotel, which is now the Chicago Hilton. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1941 and then served as a Navy intelligence officer. He graduated from Northwestern University Law School in 1947.

Stevens was just a few years away from breaking the record for the longest serving member of the court held by William O. Douglas who stepped down after 36 years on the bench. But former Stevens clerks say their boss had no interest in breaking records.

Unlike most other justices, he wrote the first draft of his opinions himself, he continues to play tennis and commutes to his home in Florida. He told Joan Biskupic of USA Today that he was surprised at the frenzy of speculation over his retirement.

"That can't be news," he said in October, declining to reveal his plans. "I'm not exactly a kid."

Asked about his legacy in the 2007 interview with ABC, Stevens said he wanted to be remembered on the basis of the opinions he's written. "There's an awful lot of them. They'd have to pick and choose among them," he said. "But you leave -- you know, you leave your record on what you had to say over the years."

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