[2][3] His long tenure saw him write for the Court on most issues of American law, including civil liberties, the death penalty, government action, and intellectual property.

[6][7] Born in Chicago, Stevens served in the United States Navy during World War II and graduated from Northwestern University School of Law.

Five years later, President Gerald Ford successfully nominated Stevens to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of Justice William O. Douglas.

[6][9] His paternal grandfather had formed an insurance company and held real estate in Chicago, and his granduncle owned the Chas A. Stevens department store.

The family lost ownership of the hotels during the Great Depression, and Stevens's father, grandfather, and an uncle were charged with embezzlement; the Illinois Supreme Court later overturned the conviction, criticizing the prosecution.

"[12] He also had the opportunity to meet several notable people of the era, including the famed aviators Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, the latter of whom gave him a caged dove as a gift.

[17] Stevens was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the codebreaking team whose work led to the downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plane in 1943 (Operation Vengeance).

[21] After receiving high recommendations from several Northwestern faculty members,[6] Stevens served as a law clerk to Supreme Court justice Wiley Rutledge during the 1947–48 term.

He was widely regarded by colleagues as an extraordinarily capable and impressive lawyer with a fantastic memory and analytical ability, and authored a number of influential works on antitrust law.

[9][24] On November 28, 1975, President Gerald Ford nominated Stevens as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to a seat vacated by William O.

Also in September 2005, Stevens was honored with a symposium by Fordham Law School for his 30 years on the Supreme Court, and President Ford wrote a letter stating his continued pride in appointing him.

[36] Stevens said that his decision to retire from the Court was initially triggered when he stumbled on several sentences when delivering his oral dissent in the 2010 landmark case Citizens United v.

[24] In October 2018, Stevens said that Brett Kavanaugh's performance during his confirmation hearings should disqualify him from serving on the Supreme Court, citing the potential for political bias.

Stevens, unlike most justices, reviewed petitions for certiorari within his chambers instead of having his law clerks participate as part of the cert pool and usually wrote the first drafts of his opinions himself;[17][27] when asked to explain why, he said: "I'm the one hired to do the job."

Stevens was once an impassioned critic of affirmative action; in addition to the 1978 decision in Bakke, he dissented in the case of Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448 (1980), which upheld a minority set-aside program.

He shifted his position over the years and voted to uphold the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School challenged in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

He also wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion in Citizens United v. FEC, arguing the majority should not make a decision so broad that it would overturn precedents set in three previous Supreme Court cases.

When reviewing his career at the Supreme Court in his 2019 book, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years, Stevens lamented being unable to persuade his colleagues against the decision in Citizens United, which he described as "a disaster for our election law.

He was initially quite critical of constitutional protection for obscenity, rejecting a challenge to Detroit zoning ordinances that barred adult theaters in designated areas in Young v. American Mini Theatres, 427 U.S. 50 (1976), ("[E]ven though we recognize that the First Amendment will not tolerate the total suppression of erotic materials that have some arguably artistic value, it is manifest that society's interest in protecting this type of expression is of a wholly different, and lesser, magnitude than the interest in untrammeled political debate"), but later in his tenure adhered firmly to a libertarian free speech approach on obscenity issues, voting to strike down a federal law regulating online obscene content considered "harmful to minors" in ACLU v. Ashcroft, 535 U.S. 564 (2002).

Stevens wrote, "The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach.

In Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985), striking down an Alabama statute mandating a minute of silence in public schools "for meditation or silent prayer", Stevens wrote the opinion for a majority that included justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell.

At one time, it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism.

But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."

Stevens wrote a dissent in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005), in which he was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; he argued that the ten commandments displayed in the Texas Capitol grounds transmitted the message: "This State endorses the divine code of the 'Judeo-Christian' God."

He then authored Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), which permits the federal government to arrest, prosecute, and imprison patients who use medical marijuana regardless of whether such use is legally permissible under state law.

Stevens wrote the lead opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case where the Court upheld the right of states to require an official photo identification card to help ensure that only citizens vote.

He believed that the holding displayed "an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed".

Stevens wrote the primary dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller 554 U.S. 570 (2008), a landmark case which addressed the interpretation of the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.

[65] Stevens' dissent seems to rest on four main points of disagreement: that the Founders would have made the individual right aspect of the Second Amendment express if that was what was intended; that the "militia" preamble and exact phrase "to keep and bear arms" demands the conclusion that the Second Amendment touches on state militia service only; that many lower courts' later "collective-right" reading of the Miller decision constitutes stare decisis, which may only be overturned at great peril; and that the Court has not considered gun-control laws (e.g., the National Firearms Act) unconstitutional.

The dissent concludes, "The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.