Remembering Justice Stevens
"What I take most from the man was his unfailing decency. He thought the best of his colleagues, even when he disagreed with them vehemently. And he was relentlessly optimistic about persuading them to come around to his way of thinking, sometimes in the teeth of lots of evidence. I clerked during a term in which the liberals lost a bunch of cases, and he hated losing. But he would shrug and move on: If he lost that round, he'd win the next."
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Professor Nick Bagley, former clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court, who died July 16 at age 99.