Some “tough journalism” from the Times’s Adam Liptak.
We learn of Stevens’s “plainspoken style,” his “common sense” and “moral clarity,” and that he is “the leader of the court’s liberal wing.” While in his early years on the Court “his views often seemed idiosyncratic,” he has since “emerged as a master tactician,” who uses the prerogatives of his seniority “to great advantage,” displaying “patience and skill.” His death penalty opinions this term involved a “carefully calibrated distinction.”
Liptak even manages to favorably cite a paragraph from Stevens’s Citizens United dissent that strikes me as a bizarre non sequitur:
Justice Stevens, who served in the Navy during World War II, reached back to those days to show the depth of his outrage at the majority’s conclusion that the government may not make legal distinctions based on whether a corporation or a person was doing the speaking.
“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”
Next time, perhaps the Times could just get one of his Stevens’s former clerks to write a tribute to him on the op-ed pages.
ruuffles says:
Irony Level: 4 out of 10
Not much daylight between this and conservations ranting about terrorists caught on US soil given the same rights as everyone else.
January 26, 2010, 10:05 amSuperSkeptic says:
A favorable commentary, obviously in contemplation of Stevens’ retirement (and therefore partially excusable, if hyperbolic), but I personally fail to see how “emerg[ing] as a master tactician” is a praiseworthy attribute in a Justice.
January 26, 2010, 10:13 amDave Hardy says:
One of his clerks? He doesn’t use clerks. He writes his opinions himself, citing authorities from memory.
“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”
Hmmm … not sure if that’s endorsing First Amendment discrimination based on viewpoint, or on the speaker’s identity, but either sounds a tad inconsistent with leadership of a “liberal” wing.
January 26, 2010, 10:17 amSnaphappy says:
Steven who? I thought this was about Justice Stevens?
This terms?
You mean non sequitur?
Next time, perhaps you could get one of your Bernstein’s students to proofread your post.
You neglect to mention the unflattering description of Stevens’s reading of his dissent in Citizens United. You’d think a “puff piece” would have been more charitable.
January 26, 2010, 10:29 amBored Lawyer says:
Let’s see now.
Tokyo Rose was an individual.
Allied Commanders were individuals.
Relevance of this to corporations = zero.
Value of this story as evidence that Stevens has lost this = very high.
January 26, 2010, 10:47 amlgm says:
Is there a whiff of tea party anger in David Bernstein’s post? Will his kettle whistle the next time the Times has a good word for Roberts or Scalia?
January 26, 2010, 11:09 amDavid Bernstein says:
Snap, thanks for the snark. WordPress has been quite iffy today, and I hit send too quickly, before it ate my post.
January 26, 2010, 11:21 amox says:
This is the kind of post that should probably have disabled comments. It just invites abusive responses. Whatever you think about Justice Stevens’ jurisprudence, it’s worth remembering that he’s given the better part of his life serving his country. That deserves some respect, and, at the end of his tenure and nearing the end of his life, even some charity. There will be plenty of time for harsh recriminations.
January 26, 2010, 11:21 amDavid Bernstein says:
Snap, thanks for the snark.
And here’s a tip, if you are making fun of someone’s proofreading, you might try proofreading your response.
January 26, 2010, 11:23 amSkyler says:
Yeah, Dunkin Donuts is an evil corporation, just like Tokyo Rose. I see the connection.
Oh, and by the way, I don’t recall anyone being stopped from listening to Tokyo Rose.
January 26, 2010, 11:27 amB.D. says:
I think that was intentional. But, yeah, he was being a jerk about rather unimportant things.
January 26, 2010, 11:34 amEric Muller says:
Small picked nit, Bored Lawyer: “Tokyo Rose” was not an individual. The name was a moniker for a number of different women who did broadcasts from Japan during the war.
January 26, 2010, 11:39 amDavid Bernstein says:
WP acting up also explains my two related comments above. Ox, I’m not angry, just a embarrassed for Liptak and the Times (though if a Times reporter ever said that Scalia exhibits “moral clarity,” I think I’d faint). Unlike Jonathan, I don’t think that long service on the Court entitles you to a puff piece. (In fact, it goes both ways; to the extent you’re a bad Justice, the longer you’re on the Court, the more damage you’ve done).
January 26, 2010, 11:41 amBored Lawyer says:
Since that is not happening any time soon, you need not worry.
January 26, 2010, 11:49 amMike says:
No one, much less Liptak himself, would characterize this piece as “tough journalism.” In fact, if Bernstein had actually done an ounce of research or reportage, he would discover that Liptak’s Sidebar columns are, in fact, columns containing Liptak’s opinionated take on the legal world (and appearing weekly).
Try again, Bernstein. And, on a more general level, retiring conservative Supreme Court Justices will never invite maudlin columns by the legal academy or mainstream media (for good reason). You best be reading the Federalist Society’s weekly bulletin for that crap.
January 26, 2010, 11:53 am1040 says:
i am sure bernstein’s not figuring it out was wordpress’ fault too. or stevens. or che t-shirts’. definitely one of them!
January 26, 2010, 11:56 amDave N. says:
On the one hand, the left argues there is no media bias, and here we have Mike evidently agreeing there is.
January 26, 2010, 12:15 pmfrankcross says:
The implicit charge on Liptak is a very false one. Linda Greenhouse, I think, had a plain liberal bias, but he does not. He has been significantly criticized by liberals for some his coverage. He did a notable Kelo-related column where he almost exclusively quoted libertarians. Volokh had no critical comment on that.
I have found that when people imply bias, it usually speaks as much to their own bias as to that of the target of their comments.
January 26, 2010, 12:29 pmDave N. says:
frankcross,
If your criticism was aimed at my comment, then you misunderstood. My comment was directed at Mike, who apparently believes that it would be inappropriate for the MSM to write a favorable end-of-a-career piece on a retiring conservative justice.
January 26, 2010, 12:47 pmNunzio says:
The New York Times has too much influence on society. Its existence is a threat to other voices who need to be heard.
So the New York Times should only be allowed 2 editions per week, and a printing of 100,000 copies for each of those editions.
We can’t have corporations distoring the debate in society.
January 26, 2010, 12:50 pmMike says:
Dave N.: You misunderstand: I don’t believe it would be inappropriate; rather, I was facetiously making the point that it will never happen. Conservatives (and especially conservative Justices) will never invite puff pieces by the mainstream media because most people who work in the mainstream media (as do I) think conservatives are a danger and embarrassment to society.
January 26, 2010, 12:58 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Nunzio: Nail on head.
Such limitations “protect equal access to the political arena[]” – Justice Stevens
January 26, 2010, 1:06 pmMark Field says:
There’s bias in the traditional media all right, but it’s not particularly liberal. It’s moderate conservative to some degree, but more important than that is that it’s pro-insider and pro-power.
January 26, 2010, 1:09 pmmethodact says:
Obscene (2007), shows lots of footage of Gerald R. Ford at press conferences holding up graphic example after graphic example of pornography to the press and cameras, in his demagogic attempts to incite the nation to impeach William O. Douglas.
Given that Ford was obsessed with the prohibition of pornography, his appointment of John Paul Stevens as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1975, must have had obscenity in mind.
I still contend that there are no liberal justices on the Court – they are Right and Far Right. They only seem liberal in contrast to radical extreme of their Far Right brethren.
January 26, 2010, 1:15 pmSnaphappy says:
I confess to charges of snarkism, but I just don’t see that much to be upset about in the NYT piece, and it struck me that there was an error in four of the five Bernstein sentences in the post. “[Y]our Bernstein’s” was a crack on “his Stevens’s,” which, as of 1:22 pm, still hasn’t been corrected. You can insert your own “perhaps when you” crack here.
January 26, 2010, 1:24 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Which means “pro-government,” which is another way of saying “liberal.”
January 26, 2010, 1:29 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Yet another NYT ball-washing of a ‘liberal icon’ – they had to find someone to fawn over now that Teddy, The Red-Nosed Senator kicked the bucket.
Nothing to see here, move along.
January 26, 2010, 1:46 pmMike says:
You’re right, Crunchy Frog. Nothing to see here unless people like D.B. choose to highlight it and link to it with careless and mindless analysis. I think your beef is with him, not the NYT or Liptak.
January 26, 2010, 2:07 pmSkyler says:
Really, I despise liberals and fail to understand how they can be considered intelligent or even benevolent. They exist nonetheless. Being so, I fail to see the harm in a polite article about a man who is about to retire, by all expectations, and be replaced by someone with the same ideological bent, thus creating no change in the makeup of the court.
January 26, 2010, 2:34 pmq says:
This post was worth the hilarious Stevens quote alone.
January 26, 2010, 2:38 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Yet you not only read the entire post, but all the comments, and felt moved enough to comment yourself. Physician, heal thyself.
January 26, 2010, 2:57 pmNunzio says:
Stevens is the only WASP left on the Court.
Will Obama be forced to nominate a WASP, and a male WASP at that, to the Court if Stevens retires.
January 26, 2010, 3:13 pmmethodact says:
By “liberal”, I have in mind those educated in the Liberal Arts, i.e. either or both the contemporary Liberal Arts (comprising the studies of literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science), and/or the classic Liberal Arts (from the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric and logic, and from the Quadrivium: geometry, arithetic, music and astronomy).
In other words, someone well versed in consilience.
January 26, 2010, 3:15 pmDisappointed says:
The most informative post in this thread by far was Snaphappy’s first, informing us about the grammatical and spelling errors in the OP; the rest appear to be partisan/ideological blather. The OP is primarily to blame. Since when does VC encourage trolling by its fellow conspirators? There is no informative content, no original thoughts, no thoughtful analysis.
What a waste.
January 26, 2010, 3:21 pmMark Field says:
Not “pro-government”, “pro-establishment”. Whether it’s the current Administration (whatever party that may be) or Wall Street or some other stomping ground for the Masters of the Universe, we can rely on the traditional media to… well, I’ll let you supply the rest.
January 26, 2010, 3:28 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I’m not accusing Liptak of “bias,” I’m accusing him of writing a puff piece. I haven’t seen any dissent from my assessment of the piece, nor, for that matter, any defense of Liptak, beyond “it’s not worth getting upset about.” Believe me, I’m not upset.
January 26, 2010, 3:32 pmmethodact says:
At least Justice Stevens seems to understand that if the inalienable rights are God-given, and that constructive corporate personhood is a fiat foisted by man, and that because it risks the steam-rollering of actual human beings, he has an obligation to a higher loyalty than that simply of corporate fealty.
I have to give him that.
January 26, 2010, 3:42 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Oh, and contrary to some comments, the fact that a “puff piece” appeared in an “analysis column” as opposed to a “news article” is not relevant to whether it is, in fact, a puff piece.
January 26, 2010, 6:33 pmraoul says:
So someone writes a puff piece and you feel the need to criticize? Why bother? And to be sure that I am an equal opportunity crank, today I also criticized Matthew Yglesias for posting something idiotic about the king of Sweden.
January 27, 2010, 12:18 am1040 says:
is liptak bernstein’s new hrw? let the games begin!
January 27, 2010, 5:02 pm