August 3: Justice Breyer

Stephen G. Breyer, the son of Anne and Irving Gerald Breyer of San Francisco, was sworn in as associate justice of the Supreme Court on this date in 1994, joining Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second of three Jews on the current Court. Breyer, with degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law, clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg, was special assistant to the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the mid-1960s, and was an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate prosecuting force in 1973 before joining the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where he became chief judge in 1990. On the Supreme Court, Breyer has consistently voted as a liberal — in favor of abortion rights, equal rights for gays and lesbians, placing limits on campaign contributions, regulating guns, and protecting immigrants; — and has served as a counterweight to Antonin Scalia’s strict “constructivist” approach to the Constitution by arguing, in books and public appearances, for a more pragmatic approach that is mindful of the law’s consequences. Breyer has voted to overturn congressional legislation at a lower rate than any other justice on the Court today. To watch Breyer and Scalia debate the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court, click here.
“The Court has a special responsibility to ensure that the Constitution works in practice. While education, including the transmission of our civic values from one generation to the next, must play the major role in maintaining public confidence in the Court’s decisions, the Court too must help maintain public acceptance of its own legitimacy. It can do this best by helping ensure that the Constitution remains ‘workable’ in a broad sense of the term. Specifically, it can and should interpret the Constitution in a way that works for the people of today.” —Stephen G. Breyer