Justice John Paul Stevens served on U.S. Supreme Court from 1975 until his retirement in 2010. He is the third-longest serving Justice in American history. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1920, Stevens served in the United States Navy during World War II and graduated from Northwestern University School of Law. He was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1970 by President Richard Nixon and to the Supreme Court in 1975 by Gerald Ford. He is the author of Five Chiefs, Six Amendments, and the newly released The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years.From the transcript of his interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg:
TOTENBERG: In his last years on the Supreme Court, Stevens was publicly worried about the court's rightward tilt. But now off the court, he's even more worried. He sees a newly constituted and more aggressive conservative court majority acting in a, quote, "less neutral fashion." For example, he dissented fiercely in 2008 when the court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to own a gun.--Marshal Zeringue
STEVENS: Its analysis of the history and the reasons for the amendment was dead wrong.
TOTENBERG: Still, as Stevens discloses in his book, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the fifth and decisive vote in the case, insisted that the decision include language protecting reasonable gun regulations. Kennedy, however, retired last June, to be replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, who, as a lower court judge, viewed as unconstitutional every major gun regulation that came before him.
So what hope, if any, do you have for the court upholding serious gun regulation were it to pass?
STEVENS: I suppose the odds are not very favorable now.
TOTENBERG:...Judicial doctrine does change over time. But do you think that the current court is taking a radical turn to the right?
STEVENS: Yes, I really do. I think some of the decisions really are quite wrong, and they're quite contrary to the public interest.
TOTENBERG: Every member of the court, not just the chief justice, goes around saying, we are not politicians; we're judges. But it gets harder and harder for some people to believe that.
STEVENS: Well, it's harder and harder to believe. But there's still some hope that it won't be totally that way. But it is true that it seems to be more ideological than it's been since...[read on]