Lonely Justice

Adam Liptak writes about the final days of Justice John Paul Stevens, his full throated dissent on the 5-4 decision equating corporations with citizens, and his distress at the activism of a Roberts' Court intent on remaking law to fit longtime conservative ideas about corporations, individual rights, and law as a means to protect the less fortunate.

“The majority blazes through our precedents,” he wrote, “overruling or disavowing a body of case law” that included seven decisions.

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.”

The reference to Tokyo Rose was probably lost on many of Justice Steven’s readers. But the concluding sentence of what may be his last major dissent could not have been clearer.

“While American democracy is imperfect,” he wrote, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”