Bench Memoirs: A Review of Five Chiefs by John Paul Stevens

FIVE CHIEFS: A SUPREME COURT MEMOIR.

By John Paul Stevens. New York: Little, Brown & Co. 2011. 292 pp. $24-99. When Justice John Paul Stevens rose from the Supreme Court bench for the final time on June 28, 2010, he had worn the robes of a Justice longer than all but two of his one hundred predecessors: Justice William O. Douglas, who held the seat immediately before him, and the nineteenth-century Justice Stephen Field.

As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in saying farewell, Stevens's tenure on the Court accounts "for nearly one sixth of its existence."