In his early years on the Court, Stevens settled into the ideological center, between William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, on the left, and Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, on the right.
The court did not split on political grounds: the four dissenters, for instance, included two conservative justices (William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas) and two moderate justices (Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens).