Existing comment:
John Paul Stevens passed on July 16, 2019. Serving from 1975 to 2010 as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, he had been appointed as a Republican and, like most open-minded people, by the end of his term was firmly on the liberal end of the court. He wrote the majority opinions in several cases including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay violated the Geneva Conventions. However, the cases which you're most familiar with are the ones where he wrote vehement dissents: Bush v. Gore (2000) which ended the contested election in Florida and gave us President Baby Bush (the 4th of 5 elections so far where the candidate with the most popular votes did not become president -- the others were John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and of course Donald Trump in 2016), District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) which wiped out gun restrictions in the District of Columbia and extended the overreaching Second Amendment's "right to bear arms" interpretation further into our lives, and Citizens United v. FEC (2010) which unleashed businesses to buy elections. |