President Joe Biden speaks with Justice Stephen Breyer after delivering the State of the Union in 2022.Photo: Saul Loeb - Pool/Getty
Stephen Breyer, 83, relinquished his Supreme Court post at noon on Thursday after 28 years as an associate justice.
A San Francisco native, Breyer first established his legal career as a law clerk for Justice Arthur Goldberg. He then went on to serve as an administrative law professor at Harvard Law School, counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and an appellate judge for nearly 14 years.
Breyer served in the Supreme Court’s liberal minority for nearly three decades, leading him to author numerous dissenting opinions. Despite this, “he always remained optimistic,” Brianne Gorod, one of his former law clerks and chief counsel at Constitutional Accountability Center, wrote in anessay. Breyer is known as a “pragmatist” who incorporates “real-world context” into his judicial decision making process.
During his confirmation hearings, Breyer vowed to “remember that the decisions I help to make will have an effect upon the lives of many, many Americans,” and, according to New York University Law ProfessorMelissa Murray, Breyer upheld that, as he is someone who “really thought about what policy meant on the ground.” His deep-seated faith in institutions propelled him to intensely contemplate each ruling’s consequences for Americans.
He “does everything he can to find common ground,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the Supreme Court’spress releaseabout his retirement.
President Bill Clinton and his Supreme Court nominee Stephen Breyer walk to the Rose Garden of the White House on May 16, 1994.AP Photo/Doug Mills)
Breyer often played the role of a consensus-builder, pulling on negotiating skills he learned during his tenure assisting the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Behind the scenes, he brokered compromises, saying in a Slateinterviewthat working for Sen. Ted Kennedy on the committee taught him to get the person you disagree with talking, “eventually — it happens almost always — they’ll say something you agree with.”
Breyer is known for his long, hypothetical questions during oral argument, which Neal Katyal, former acting U.S. Solicitor General,told PBS NewsHourallows “a conversation between justice and advocate.”
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Breyer typically voted in favor of environmental protections, including strengthening the Clean Water Act with his 2020 majority opinion and in 2007, voted to grant the EPA permission to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Twice before the court, he contemplated the constitutionality of the death penalty, authoring a dissent withJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburgin 2015 that ended with, “I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment.”
source: people.com
