últimas notícias

In 1942 he married Elizabeth Jane Sheeren, with whom he had a son and three daughters. The couple divorced in 1979, and Justice Stevens married Maryan Mulholland Simon, a dietitian, the next year. She died in 2015. His son, John Joseph, died of cancer in 1996, and his daughter Kathryn preceded him in death.

He is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth Jane Sesemann and Susan Roberta Mullen, nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

With two older brothers who were lawyers, John was encouraged after his discharge from the Navy to attend law school himself. He used the G.I. Bill to attend Northwestern University Law School, where he completed his degree in two years. He was editor in chief of the law review and graduated first in the class of 1947 with the highest grade-point average in the school’s history.

A Supreme Court clerkship was a natural sequel. He spent the court’s 1947-48 term as a law clerk to Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, a respected former law professor and dean who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last Supreme Court appointee.

Justice Rutledge, who died of a stroke at 55 in 1949, cutting short his service on the court after six years, influenced his young protégé profoundly. Justice Rutledge viewed himself as an old-fashioned “common law” judge who decided cases one at a time. He was a liberal and, while committed to a strong national government, was also an internationalist; in 1948 he dissented on behalf of a group of German-born United States residents challenging the government’s right to deport them.

Justice Rutledge had “great faith in wisdom born of experience and mistrusted untried statements of general principles,” Mr. Stevens wrote in an admiring essay in the mid-1950s, years before his own judicial career began. Decades later, in writing the court’s opinion that gave the Guantánamo detainees access to federal court, Justice Stevens took great pleasure in vindicating his old boss’s position in the 1948 case, Ahrens v. Clark. And in rejecting the Bush administration’s plan for military commissions, Justice Stevens cited another dissent by Justice Rutledge, from 1946, in which he argued on behalf of habeas corpus for a Japanese general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had been sentenced to death by a military commission.

After his Supreme Court clerkship, Mr. Stevens returned to Chicago to begin what would be a 22-year career in private practice. Although he had always been known simply as John Stevens, he began adding his middle name when signing legal pleadings to add something extra to his bland first and last names. The full name eventually became part of his professional identity.