Behind the scenes, Breyer pushed and prodded his fellow justices for consensus. His decision gives President Biden his first opportunity to name a new justice to the court:
. These are all matters that he has strong feelings about, and he thought that his 27 years on the court might enable him to prevent a wild swing to the right. In the 2020 term, he had played just that role.
In the 2020 court term, Breyer remained an important force, authoring some of the court's most important decisions. He wrote the court's Behind the scenes, Breyer pushed and prodded his fellow justices for consensus on everything from Obamacare to affirmative action in higher education. "It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much," Breyer said in a lengthy dissent from the bench. The decision, he added, would undermine racial progress in America and would go down in history as"a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret."
Although briefly dejected, Breyer returned to his optimistic ways, always hoping to persuade, and sometimes succeeding. To keep him on his chosen path, he made time for a short period of meditation each day.Stephen Gerald Breyer was born in San Francisco, the son of a lawyer for the city's public schools. He was so smart that his mother worried that he would be too bookish and so ensured that he was not.
Her husband would spend decades as a professor at Harvard Law School, but with several stints in Washington — in the Justice Department's antitrust division, as assistant prosecutor in the investigation of the Watergate scandal and as chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
In 1993, he was a finalist to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. He was about to come to Washington for an interview with then-President Bill Clinton when he was knocked off his bike by a car. With broken ribs and a punctured lung, he took the long train ride to Washington for the meeting. He was in considerable pain at the time, and the word was the interview didn't go particularly well.
"History is very often in these matters a blank slate or a confused slate, and if you want to govern the country by means of that history, then you better select nine historians and not nine judges to be on the court," Breyer told NPR."And I'll tell you, those nine historians will very often disagree with each other."
Breyer's approach to the border was definitely pragmatic. Thus, when a coalition of liberal and conservative justices invalidated the mandatory federal sentencing guidelines, Breyer dissented but was able to preserve the guidelines in a separate opinion by making them voluntary instead of mandatory. That gave judges more wiggle room in sentencing but preserved the guidelines as a measuring stick.
Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice David Souter, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Stephen Breyer pose for photographers at the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 31, 2005, in Washington, D.C. hat and tie, gestures while reading Dr.
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