Breyer, Stephen Gerald
[key], 1938–, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
(1994–2022), b. San Francisco. A graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and
Harvard Law School (1964), he clerked (1964–65) for Supreme Court
Justice Arthur Goldberg, then
worked for the Justice Dept. and as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary
Committee. In 1980 President Carter appointed him to the First Circuit Court
of Appeals, in Boston, where he became chief judge. In the 1980s Breyer was
a prominent member of the commission that drafted new federal sentencing
guidelines. In 1994, when Harry Blackmun retired from the U.S. Supreme
Court, Breyer was nominated by President Clinton to replace him. Though
Breyer is regarded as a cautious, moderate jurist and a firm believer in
judicial restraint, he has been one of the more liberal members on a Court
that has grown increasinly conservative since the 1990s. He has written
Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic
Constitution (2005), which argues that the intent of the U.S.
constitution is to facilitate the citizens' ability to govern themselves
effectively while protecting individual liberties, and that a judicial
approach that seeks to be faithful to the original intent of the
constitution by focusing on its words alone risks being unfaithful to the
document's purpose. He is also the author of Making Our Democracy
Work: A Judge's View (2010), which calls for jurists to be
cooperative partners with Congress, the president, and other official
practitioners of self-government while still fulfilling their roles as
guardians of constitutional liberties. In a third book, The Court
and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities
(2015), Breyer argues that in an era of increased global interconnectedness,
in many cases the Court must understand and take into consideration not just
the American Constitution and American legal precedents but also foreign and
international law. In January 2022, Breyer announced he would be retiring
from the court at the end of the 2021-22 term.
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