Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens made national news when he criticized the court’s controversial 2010 Citizens United decision in a Clinton School speech Wednesday.
Stevens, who was on the court at the time and dissented from the ruling, said he expects the court will eventually have to create exceptions to the ruling that would “create a crack in the foundation” of the controversial opinion.
The Associated Press reported on Stevens’ remarks:
Speaking to hundreds of people at a Wednesday night event in Little Rock, the retired justice said President Barack Obama accurately criticized the ruling for reversing a century of law and allowing special interest groups to pump money into elections.
He cited Justice Samuel Alito’s reaction to Obama’s criticism, along with one of the court’s later rulings when the justices rejected a free-speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups to a law that bars support to terrorist organizations.
Stevens said “the fact that the proposed speech would indirectly benefit a terrorist organization provided a sufficient basis for denying it First Amendment protection.”
He also pointed to televised debates when moderators try to allow candidates equal time to express their views. He said candidates and viewers wouldn’t like it if there were an auction giving the most time to the highest bidder.
“Yet that is essentially what happens during actual campaigns in which rules equalizing campaign expenditures are forbidden,” he said.
Stevens served as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1975 to his retirement in 2010. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1942–1945, and was a law clerk to Justice Wiley Rutledge of the Supreme Court during the 1947 term.
Nominated by President Gerald Ford, Stevens recently published a memoir about his time with the court titled “Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir.”
His lecture was hosted in partnership with Arkansas Access to Justice and the UALR Bowen School of Law.