attorney general edward levy to just find me the best person, and, you know, i ll just mention one other thing that reminds us how things have changed. so john paul stevens was the first justice to go on the court after the court decided the abortion case, roe against wade. so roe against wade was decided in january of 1973. john paul stevens was nominated by president ford in 1975, almost three years later. he did not get a single question at his confirmation hearing about abortion. wow. that just tells us something. and what i think it tells us is that it was only later that abortion became the political lightning rod that we have all grown up thinking of it as, and it was just just another issue among many back in 1975. it s interesting to me the sort of heterogeneous nature of that issue of publicity in the courts and politics in the
i ll just say one more thing about that. i mean, it s true that the court changed around him, but he wouldn t have denied he didn t deny that his own views had changed, for instance. late in his career he came out against the death penalty, for instance. and he gave a talk, oh, maybe about ten years before he retired in which he said, you know, part of the job of being on the court is learning on the job and to keep learning, and i always read that as a kind of a, you know, coded way of saying, yeah, sure, i ve changed my mind about things. and he was he was open to change and, you know, i think he would listen through to every argument, but he didn t see things toward the end in the same way he necessarily had seen them in the beginning. linda greenhouse, lecturer now at yale law school, former supreme court reporter for the new york times. linda, you were the first person i wanted to talk to tonight when i heard this news. thanks for making time for us. i really appreciate it
was he felt he still had something to contribute and something to tell us, and he certainly did. linda, i also wanted to ask you about this idea that the court sort of shifted around him, which is the way that he described it. he never described himself as having changed in his position on the ideological number line or having become more liberal, even though he was nominated by a republican by a republican president and ultimately was seen as a leader of the liberal wing. what was he like in terms of comity among the justices, in terms of, you know, as as the makeup of the court changed during his decades on the bench. what was he like in terms of putting together majorities, putting together consensus, what was he like in those conferences with the other judges? well, i think in the early years the sort of knock on him was that he was a go it alone kind of justice. he just said what he thought was the right thing to say. he had a number of famously
frustrated as she may be with mr. stone, is that both parties, not just the defendant but both parties get a fair trial. so as long as she s convinced that she can draw a fair jury and he s not influencing witnesses, it appears that she s willing to give him a little more leash. i d be very surprised if he violated yet again another gag order that she would continue to let him remain out on bond pending trial. to that point, we did see two hours after her order mr. stone s wife start posting about him, photos of him and discussion about today s hearing on instagram. that s obviously from her and not him. would a judge or would a court usually expect that a defendant s immediate family members would respect the same sort of restriction that was imposed on the defendant? there is the spirit of the order, which they re clearly violating, and then there is the letter of the order, which she apparently did not violate. but this is not a judge to be trifled with. remember, she didn t hes
solitary opinions and that sort of thing, but once he became the senior associate justice, and since he happened to be on the liberal side of the bench by then, he was really in charge of kind of marshalling the liberals. he became quite strategic, i think. as you mentioned in your kind of open that you gave at the top of the hour, that he wrote one and actually he wrote a couple of the major guantanamo decisions in which he was able to write in a way that got justice kennedy s vote, for instance, and form a majority for the right of the guantanamo detainees to get before a federal judge. and he you know, he became more strategic. i ll just say one more thing about that. i mean, it s true that the court changed around him, but he wouldn t have denied he didn t deny that his own views had changed, for instance.