Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the third-longest serving justice in history, died on July 16, 2019 at the age of 99.

“He passed away peacefully with his daughters by his side,” the Supreme Court said in a statement. Stevens, survived by two daughters, died at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida after suffering a stroke on July 15.

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Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Gerald Ford in 1975, after the country was rocked by the Watergate scandal. “You’re coming out of such turmoil, my understanding is the objective of President Ford and his staff was to find somebody who was as apolitical as possible and above reproach in terms of integrity,” says Jeffrey Fisher, who clerked for Stevens in 1998-1999. “Those were the justice’s two calling cards all the way through his career.”

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In his 2019 memoir The Making of a Justice, Stevens cites 2000’s Apprendi v. New Jersey as what he views as another of his most important majority opinions. In Apprendi, Stevens held that any fact that could increase a defendant’s criminal sentence needed to be found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. “In terms of consequences for the legal system, especially the criminal justice system, I think that might have had the most reverberations of any criminal law opinion, certainly [that] he wrote,” says Fisher.