US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a leader of the court’s liberal wing, will decide soon whether to retire after 35 years on the court, two newspapers on Saturday quoted him as saying.
Stevens, 89, has hinted for weeks that retirement may be at hand, but has said he has not made up his mind. In interviews published in the New York Times and Washington Post, he discussed his possible retirement.
He plans to leave either this year or next, the Post reported, quoting Stevens as saying: “I will surely do it while he’s [Barack Obama] still [US] president.”
His retirement would allow Obama to make a second appointment to the court in a year, but it was not expected to change the court’s ideological makeup. The Senate confirmed Obama’s selection of appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor for the high court last summer.
“I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process. The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy,” Stevens told the New York Times.
“I can tell you that I love the job and deciding whether to leave it is a very difficult decision,” he told the Washington Post. “But I want to make it in a way that’s best for the court.”
Stevens, who turns 90 on April 20, is one of the oldest and longest-serving justices in the history of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1975 after being nominated by former US president Gerald Ford, a Republican.
The White House already has begun preparing to choose Stevens’s successor, the Post reported. Stevens told the Post that Obama, who has taught constitutional law, is a “very competent president” to make choices for the Supreme Court — perhaps the best “since Gerald Ford.”
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