Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens names 3 decisions he believes were 'grave errors'
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens turns 99 in April, and he is preparing to release a memoir of his first 94 years. In a Monday interview with The New York Times about the forthcoming work, Stevens reminisced on his 35-year SCOTUS tenure, naming three decisions he considered "grave errors" of his time.
The worst decision of the lot, Stevens said, was 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller, which affirmed a Second Amendment right to individual gun ownership, striking down the District of Columbia's handgun ban.
Stevens dissented. "The combination of its actual practical impact by increasing the use of guns in the country and also the legal reasoning, which I thought was totally unpersuasive," he told the Times, "persuaded me that the case is just about as bad as any in my tenure."
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In second place was Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the landmark campaign finance ruling, and in third was Bush v. Gore (2000), the decision on Florida's recount controversy that settled the presidential election in George W. Bush's favor.
Stevens dissented from the majority in these cases as well. Read his memories of those decisions — and much more — at The New York Times.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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