Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

WSJ Best of the Web has piercing things to say about the subjectivism and hypocrisy of Justice Stevens:

The most striking dissenting statement in Parents Involved was Justice John Paul Stevens’s conclusion:

It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.

There’s a lovely irony in Stevens’s appealing to the authority of dead white males while styling himself the champion of oppressed minorities. But by invoking the ghosts of justices past, Stevens reveals that his views of the subject are rooted in personal preference and not legal principle.

It’s reminiscent of another pronouncement a justice made 15 years ago:

I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today. That, I regret, may be exactly where the choice between the two worlds will be made.

That was Harry Blackmun in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the “constitutional” right to abort that had sprung from Blackmun’s imagination 19 years earlier. Blackmun retired in 1994 and died in 1999.

Stevens is 87 years old. He cannot remain on this court forever either. Like Blackmun in his twilight years, he seems dimly aware that “law” based on the preferences of men is as evanescent as the lives of men. Only principle endures.

Think of the Court of 1930! Does Stevens, that unprincipled legal hoodlum, want to bring it back? It trumps his 1975 court. (Anyway, wasn’t Rehnquist on his 1975 court? Maybe he’s blocked the memory of that long-time colleague.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.