In my office, I have a bobble-head doll of Justice Stevens. In one hand, he holds a golf club. Or, at least, he used to before my children—early in their young lives—became fascinated with this miniature version of the Justice. In his other hand, he holds an open volume of the U.S. Reports. The volume is opened to a case—and likely the most cited one Justice Stevens ever wrote: Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. I thought about that case, and Justice Stevens’ relationship to it, as I read his wonderful address to this law school that is published in this volume of the law review. I thought about Chevron because so many of the themes that his essay touches upon—none of which advert directly to Chevron, or even to administrative law more generally—seem to intersect in one way or another with that case, the Justice’s relationship to it, and recent commentary about it.
As Justice Stevens notes in his remarks, Justice Rutledge was a great influence in his life. Rutledge was a former law school dean and, prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, a noted New Dealer. He attracted notice from the president who appointed him, Franklin Roosevelt, in consequence of speeches that he gave across the country that strongly supported the president’s New Deal philosophy. In those speeches, Rutledge challenged the legal positions of those who opposed that philosophy on constitutional grounds.
Rutledge was, in many respects, a student and a proponent of the legal realist philosophy that swept through American legal thought in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this respect, it is fitting that Justice Stevens would author Chevron. That decision is, in many ways, a product of the jurisprudential philosophy that guided Rutledge and those of his generation.