Profile of Justice Stevens

Jeffrey Rosen has written a very nice profile of the Supreme Court's oldest and longest-serving justice, John Paul Stevens. The piece is perhaps a bit too deferential, but given the Justices' notorious aversion to publicity, it's something of a coup that Rosen would be granted such exclusive access to a sitting member of the Court.

Rosen's easy style almost obscures what I think is the piece's most interesting puzzle--explaining how a self-styled "conservative" Ford appointee has come to be viewed as the leader of the "liberal" wing of the court. But the notion that an expert member of an institution that functions by attempting to reconcile new and difficult decisions with a standing body of law and its various interpretations through history could be correctly viewed as anything other than "conservative," should be seen at the outset as laughable.

There is, to be sure, a question about the priority that different values should receive in the process of reconciling the new decisions with the old. But when any given faction of the court prioritizes its values in a way that is consistently at odds with standing precedent, it's difficult to see how they may, without irony, meaningfully be styled "conservatives."

"Radical unitary executive statist thugs," would, I suppose, have been been a bit gratuitous. Rosen chose instead "movement conservatives," a phrase so oxy-moronic that it at once gives up the game, for those who trouble themselves to think about it.