When John Paul Stevens took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on December 17, 1975, my mother was two months older than I am today. Three weeks earlier, some kid at Harvard had written the word "Micro-soft" for the first time.
William Douglas, whom Justice Stevens replaced, took the oath on April 17, 1939, three days after John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. My grandmother was nine. When she turned ten, the Japanese invaded her hometown.
Justice Douglas had replaced Louis Brandeis, who took office on June 5, 1916, less than three weeks after a couple guys named Sykes and Picot divvied up the Middle East, hopelessly unaware of what they were getting the world into. Later that year, my great-grandfather (from the other side) commanded the Third National Protection Army in Guangdong's fight for independence from Yuan Shikai. It may have been the only good fight he fought.
Justice Brandeis was the sixty-seventh justice of the Supreme Court. The woman who replaces Justice Stevens will be the one hundred and twelfth. Three guys; forty-five justices and ninety-four years on the bench between them. As a third-year in law school, that is a whole lot more opinions than I ever want to have to think about again, and those three wrote some pretty good ones.
But as a history major, as a student of the court and its country's cases and controversies, that is a whole lot more of the world than I can ever hope to live. I don't agree with life terms, but they sure make things interesting.
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