Editor’s note: Retired Justice John Paul Stevens died on Tuesday, July 16 at his home in Florida following a stroke. He was 99. John Paul Stevens turned 99 years old in April, but the former Supreme Court justice isn’t stepping back from the public eye just yet. In his new memoir The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years, which comes out Tuesday and runs more than 500 pages, Stevens writes about matters both personal and political. He recounts tales ranging from his Navy service during World War II to throwing out a first pitch for his beloved Chicago Cubs to his desperate efforts to stop the Supreme Court from recognizing an individual right to bear arms in 2008’s landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which he called the court’s gravest error in his 34 years on the bench. “The tragedies are multiplying one after another,” Stevens told TIME, referencing recent mass shootings. Stevens spoke to TIME by phone in May. Below is a transcript of the interview, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. TIME: You believe that District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to bear arms — and from which you dissented — was the worst decision the court made during your tenure. Why is that? Stevens: It’s quite wrong on the merits. But beyond that, it seemed to me quite outrageous to depart from a settled rule of law. As history has demonstrated in recent years, the tragedies are multiplying one after another. And the decision of the court in Heller has contributed to that. Are there any decisions you personally regret? One of the death-penalty cases in my first year on the court. We should have put [the statute in that case] in the group of mandatory death-penalty statues that we held unconstitutional. So, I think I got that wrong. You write in your memoir that when you arrived in Washington in 1951, “the members of the two parties respected one another and cooperated.” Is something broken in Washington today? It’s much more adversarial. I think maybe the people in elected positions are more interested in preserving their jobs than in doing the best job possible. You claim that the introduction of television had an impact on the confirmation process. How so? My hearings were not televised, and on the first morning, five minutes after I’d been introduced, they started asking questions. Now the first day is consumed by statements by the Senators about how important the hearings are. Should oral arguments at the Supreme Court be televised? That’s a very difficult question, and I have been close to both sides of it. But I still think the procedure works more effectively without television. You write that Clarence Thomas’ views on the Constitution were more important to you during his hearings than the controversy over Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual misconduct. Do you feel the same way about Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford? I think in both cases, the quality of their judicial work is far more important than the other issues. In the book you write that when the Supreme Court unanimously decided in 1974 that President Nixon’s executive privilege claim didn’t protect him from turning over his White House tapes, it was the high point in the nation’s respect for its independent judiciary. Do you think that independence, or at least the public perception of it, has been eroded under President Trump? I don’t know particularly by President Trump, but I do think that was the high point, which means that nothing has happened since then that equals the importance of that particular case. What do you think of the idea bouncing around in the 2020 Democratic primary to expand the Supreme Court? I’m not in favor. I think in the long run, the number nine is correct. You used to have your pilot’s license and wrote that you’d always wished you’d flown President Ford. I still have the license. I guess I quit sometime before I retired. I really think if I had the guts to ask him, he might have accepted. You joke that throwing out a first pitch at a Cubs game in 2005 was the high point of your career. How do you think the Cubs are looking this season? They’re not as good as their potential. But they’ll come back. You had an agreement with Justice David Souter that he would let you know honestly when you had declined mentally and should retire. Should Supreme Court Justices have term limits? No. I’ve always thought they’re able to work it out for themselves. If you had served three more days, you would have tied Justice Stephen Johnson Field’s record for the second-longest serving Justice. Do you wish you’d stayed on? No, it’s not a particularly interesting achievement. And, Justice Field stopped working full-time a couple months before he retired, so maybe I should be put in second place. What advice do you have for the newest justices Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are just starting out their Supreme Court careers? I think they should do their very best to understand the arguments on both sides, and just do the job they had done well as Court of Appeals judges, and I think they’ll get along OK. This book took you years to write. What are you looking forward to doing now that it’s finally out? I do a lot of reading and have a number of things to do that keep me busy. Have you read any good books recently? Yes, I’ve read [John] Kerry’s autobiography, and the book about Justice O’Connor, and Mrs. Obama’s book, which is a wonderful book. There continue to be good books to read and I continue to try to find the best. The memoir was partly inspired by the big party your wife threw you to celebrate your 94th birthday. How do you want to celebrate your 100th? I better wait and see. I’ll face that question when it’s a little closer. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.berenson@time.com.<doc-sep>Amna Nawaz: Former Justice John Paul Stevens spent 35 years on the Supreme Court writing some of the court's most important decisions. Today, at 99 years old, he's still writing and weighing in on some of the country's most controversial issues. Judy Woodruff caught up with Justice Stevens last month. And he shared his thoughts on everything from President Trump to how a childhood accident shaped his future views on gun ownership.<doc-sep>He continued: “Just the other day there was another school shooting in Colorado, and every time it happens, it seems to me we don’t have to have this kind of thing in this country, and we should do everything we can to try to change it.”<doc-sep>
THE MAKING OF A JUSTICE Reflections on My First 94 Years By John Paul Stevens John Paul Stevens ended his remarkable 35-year term on the Supreme Court with the approval of the Republican president who appointed him and the Democratic one who replaced him. Gerald Ford wrote in 2005 that he was prepared to let “history’s judgment” of his presidency rest exclusively on his decision in 1975 to nominate Stevens. Barack Obama scrawled his endorsement on a birthday note to Stevens in 2014 — “We miss you on the Court!” The cross-party embrace of Stevens by these two presidents shows the distance to the right the Republican Party has traveled from Ford to Trump far more than Stevens’s own shift in the opposite direction. He was the last of a group of Republican appointees (Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, David Souter and, to a degree, Sandra Day O’Connor) who breathed compassion into the law and put the impact of their decisions on real people above arid theories. In one of his last judicial opinions, Stevens wrote that his approach to interpreting the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty “is guided by history but not beholden to it.” He described his willingness to “protect some rights even if they have not already received uniform protection from the elected branches.” And crucially he argued that no method can separate the beliefs of individual judges from the work of the court. “It all depends on judges’ exercising careful, reasoned judgment,” Stevens wrote. “As it always has, and as it always will.” [ John Paul Stevens has died. Read our obituary here. ] Clues to how Stevens arrived at that conclusion are sprinkled through “The Making of a Justice,” but only if you dig for them. Stevens’s new book (the third since his retirement in 2010) is more catalog than sustained argument. It suffers from the burden of completism and the frustration of muffled drama. In 1933, when Stevens was 12, his father was charged with embezzlement, and a group of armed robbers who thought he’d hidden $1 million in tomato cans burst into the family’s house one evening. But Stevens plays down the effects. “I do not recall any special fear for our safety during the ensuing months in that year,” he writes. Turning to his time as a justice, he devotes a chapter each to his 36 terms on the court. To follow the intellectual arc from one decision to a later one that relates to it, you have to read a lot of pages. Which, come to think of it, is probably what it feels like to do the work of a Supreme Court justice.