When retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens died a few weeks ago at age 99, my principal memories of him were as someone who would go along with the pro-big-government orthodoxy and groupthink on pretty much any important issue. This was the man who had written opinions including Kelo v. City of New London (allowing use of a government’s eminent domain power to take property from one private owner only to turn it over to another), Arizona v. Cant (supporting an expansive view of police ability to search a vehicle after arresting the driver), and Massachusetts v. EPA (finding that EPA must determine under the Clean Air Act whether emissions of CO2 constitute a “danger” to human health and safety, and if so, must regulate those emissions). Was there anything actually interesting about this guy?

But then, on reading a few obituaries of Stevens, I learned that he was an “Oxfordian” — that is, someone who supported the position that the true author of the Shakespeare plays and other works was not the commoner from Stratford-on-Avon about whom we have all learned, but rather Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. And Stevens wasn’t just someone who had expressed at some point a vague sympathy with the Oxfordian thesis. Instead, he had conducted a moot court exercise on the authorship question, and then actually written a substantial article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1992 (well into his time as a Supreme Court justice) laying out the Oxfordian position in the form of presentation of evidence in a legal case. And in 2009 (shortly before his retirement from the Court) Stevens had been given an award called “Oxfordian of the Year” by something called the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, a group of supporters of the Oxfordian thesis.

Have you ever gotten interested in the question of the “authorship” of the Shakespeare works? . . .