As the justices of the Supreme Court gather to conference this morning, perhaps they will take a moment to wish their former colleague a happy birthday.

Today retired Justice John Paul Stevens turns 92.

By the way, he is still not the longest-living justice. That honor goes to Justice Stanley Forman Reed, who lived to age 95.

The ideology of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court has always been a topic of discussion and debate, and with hot-button issues before the Court like the health care law mandate, immigration and affirmative action, the chatter is louder than ever. But just where do the justices sit on the ideological scale?

According to a news study, the justices are not a band of judicial activists, as some accuse. Their diverse views largely mirror those of Americans, according to researchers.

“Despite its intentional isolation from popular pressure, the Court’s decisions are not out of line with public preferences,” write Stephen Jessee of the University of Texas and Neil Malhotra of Stanford University in the unpublished paper “Ideological Proximity and Support for the Supreme Court,” according to the Washington Post. “This contrasts with popular images of judges as rogue activists.”

According to the study, the Court’s most conservative justice is Justice Clarence Thomas, whose views lie to the right of 97 percent of Americans surveyed. Justice Antonin Scalia was second, with views that are more conservative than about 89 percent of Americans.

On the other end of the scale, retired Justice John Paul Stevens was seen as the most left-leaning jurist, with views that are more liberal than 85 percent of surveyed Americans. He just beat out Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is to the left of 83 percent of those surveyed.

Retired Justice John Paul Stevens showed his sense of humor – and patience – during an interview last night with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.

After Colbert expressed disappointment with his team for not securing an active Supreme Court justice to interview, he chided Stevens for failing to take his lifetime appointment literally. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you sound like a quitter,” Colbert said.

“I am,” Stevens replied. “I am a quitter. After 37 years you’re entitled to quit.”

Speaking about Stevens’ book, “Five Chiefs,” Colbert asked: “Were you upset that you were never one of the chiefs?”

“Well, you know, I was acting chief for a while,” Stevens said.

“Did you go mad with power?” Colbert queried. “You know, ‘Scalia – through the spanking machine!’”

“No I never went that far,” Stevens chuckled.

On the Citizens United ruling, Colbert challenged Stevens’ assertion that, although corporations case considered persons in some contexts, they don’t enjoy all the rights that humans do.

“You don’t have the right to judge the way” corporations do things, Colbert said.

“I think I do,” Stevens replied.
“You do? Why, because you’re a Supreme Court justice?”

“That’s right,” Stevens said.

“Ok. fantastic,” Colbert snarks. “Ok. You’re a Supreme Court justice, I’m not. That gives you the right to judge things. That’s very convenient.”

Colbert’s last question for Stevens: “Are there any decisions you’ve made that you’ve regretted?”

“Other than this interview?” Stevens said. “I don’t think so.”

See the whole interview here.

“Oddly enough, since that time, I’ve felt fine and I’m sure the way the last year has gone, I would have been perfectly capable of continuing the job because I’ve continued to do a fair amount of writing that I’ve enjoyed. That’s one of the things that I enjoyed particularly about the job – I liked doing the writing. And, of course, the work is challenging. But I may have jumped the gun a little bit.”

~ Justice John Paul Stevens, 91, speaking in an interview with AARP’s Inside E Street about his decision to retire last year after stumbling while announcing his dissent in Citizens United v. FEC – a decision he now admits may have been a bit premature.

Retired Justice John Paul Stevens – who wasted no opportunity as a justice to voice his opinions in dissents, particularly in cases involving the  death penalty – took the unusual move of sharply criticizing a recent opinion by his former colleagues on the Court.

Speaking in New York Monday night at a dinner sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevens made clear his strong disagreement with the Court’s recent ruling in Connick v. Thompson, in which the Court held that district attorney’s office couldn’t be held liable for failure to train under §1983 based on a single Brady violation by its employees. In so ruling, the Court overturned a $14 million award by a jury to a man who wrongly convicted of murder and spent 18 years on death row before being exonerated by blood evidence only weeks before he was set to be executed.

The blood evidence had been hidden by one of the prosecutors, who later confessed to doing so on his death bed. The jury found that the Brady violation was “substantially caused by the District Attorney’s failure, through deliberate indifference, to establish policies and procedures” to avoid such violations.

Stevens called the facts of the case “shocking,” and blasted the rule followed by Justice Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion, which held that that plaintiffs must show a pattern of violations in order to hold a district attorney or other government supervisor liable for failure to train.

“Why is it that when employees in a District Attorney’s office commit flagrant violations of constitutional rights it is not grounds for imposition of tort liability on attorneys’ employer?” Stevens asked the crowd, according to the text of his speech, which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog. “In other words, why does the familiar common law doctrine of respondeat superior not subject a government employer to liability for constitutional torts committed by its employees acting within the scope of their employment?”

He called on Congress to respond – as it did after other Court rulings such as Ledbetter, by making “a simple potential change in a federal rule of law that would have salutary effects on the administration of justice.”

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his decision to step down from the nation’s highest Court in April of 2010. But he made his decision months earlier: on Jan. 21, 2010, to be exact. That was the day Stevens announced from the bench his dissent in the controversial case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

As he read from his dissenting opinion, his speech faltered. The incident was noted by members of the Supreme Court press, including CBS News’ Jan Crawford, who wrote: “it was striking to see him appear to stumble over words as he read it, to mispronounce words like ‘corruption’ and ‘allegation,’ to seem to lose his place in his summary, to often hit the microphone with his hand or his papers.”

She added that it could have been “just a bad day.” But Stevens, speaking recently to The Atlantic, revealed that for him, it was much more. Despite his doctor’s diagnosis that there was “no problem,” Stevens decided not to wait around until there was a problem.

“[T]hat was the day I decided to resign,” Stevens said. “I learned giving that talk that I had a speech problem.”

He may have retired from the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court, but we are sure Justice John Paul Stevens’ former colleagues and other Supreme Court enthusiasts wish him a happy birthday today.

The justice turns 91.

The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse wonders if Justice John Paul Stevens’ recent post-retirement appearances – and the chords they are striking – make the case for term limits on the nation’s highest court.

In her latest “Opinionator” essay, Greenhouse clarifies that she doesn’t believe Stevens should have left the bench earlier than he did. Rather, she points out the value of the retired justice as someone who, like Stevens, can become a “public truth-teller” – and even a judicial “rock star.”

“Not so long ago, it was typical for justices to remain on the court until they died (the exit strategy of 49 of the 103 justices not currently serving) or became enfeebled by age (recall the explanation that Justice Thurgood Marshall gave when he retired in 1991 at the age of 83: ‘I’m old and falling apart,’)” Greenhouse wrote. “I can’t remember when the country was blessed by the presence of three retired justices who can get themselves from one place to another unaided.”

Indeed Stevens, 90, as well as retired Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, 80, and David Souter, 71, have all been active, visible and vocal since leaving the bench. O’Connor and Souter even continue to work, sitting on lower courts and hearing appellate cases.

Stevens most recently made headlines over his candid comments regarding the death penalty. During the course of his tenure on the Court, his stance on the issue changed: while his early rulings upheld the death penalty over Eight Amendment challenges, he later wrote – often in dissents and statements in capital cases - that he believed the way the system was administered is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.

Stevens even recently penned a book review of David Garland’s Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition in the New York Review of Books essay, noting that two years ago Stevens called capital punishment “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.” He also appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last weekend, showing he has no intention of slowing down.

Saying “fear of the unknown is the source of most invidious prejudice,” retired Justice John Paul Stevens urged Americans to be supportive of a plan to build an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center in New York.

In a speech at the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation in Washington Thursday, the retired Supreme Court justice said Americans should not show animosity to all American Muslims simply because the Sept. 11 terrorists were also Muslim.

“Guilt by association is unfair,” said Stevens, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Stevens, a World War II veteran, said he come to a similar realization himself years ago after seeing Japanese tourists at Pearl Harbor. His first thought, he said, was “[t]hese people don’t really belong here.”

He later realized such broad generalizations were wrong.

“We should never pass judgment on barrels and barrels of apples just because one of them may be rotten,” Stevens said.

When the Supreme Court opens its term next month, the absence of retired Justice John Paul Stevens will be felt in many ways – particularly when the Court takes up several cases dealing with the issue of federal preemption of state law claims and regulations, experts say.

“Justice Stevens has been, up to this point, the voice against preemption,” said Eric G. Lasker, a partner in the Washington office of Hollingsworth LLP, speaking at a Supreme Court media briefing yesterday hosted by the Washington Legal Foundation.

Michael A.Carvin, a partner in the Washington office of Jones Day, echoed that sentiment yesterday at a Supreme Court discussion panel hosted by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

Justice Stevens has been the most reliable anti-preemption vote,” Carvin said.

The Court’s newest jurist, Justice Elena Kagan, has indicated that she will recuse from two major preemption cases being taken up this fall. In Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, the Court will consider whether a tort claim against a manufacturer for choosing not to install a combination lap/shoulder belt in a vehicle’s middle backseat is impliedly preempted by a federal motor vehicle regulation. In Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the Court will take up the question of whether the Vaccine Act expressly preempts all vaccine design defect claims, regardless of whether the vaccine’s side effects were unavoidable. That matter involves a plaintiff who alleged that she suffered seizure disorders as a result of taking a polio vaccine as a child. (More on the potential effect of Kagan’s recusals in those cases can be found here from Lawyers USA)

So which justice or justices might emerge as the new voice against preemption in Stevens absence?

On the issue of express preemption, experts say Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may take the anti-preemption baton, given her past opinions.

But on the issue of implied preemption, states and plaintiff’s attorneys may have an unlikely ally: Justice Clarence Thomas.

“Justice Thomas has been consistent in his opposition to the idea of implied preemption,” Lasker said.

Thomas was part of the majority in the landmark implied preemption case Wyeth v. Levine holding that state law drug claims are not automatically preempted by federal regulation. But Thomas also wrote a separate concurrence in that case because, as he wrote, “I cannot join the majority’s implicit endorsement of far-reaching implied preemption doctrines [because] implied preemption doctrines that wander far from the statutory text are inconsistent with the Constitution.”