Stephen Breyer

Stephen Gerald Breyer (born August 15, 1938) is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022.

He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and replaced retiring justice Harry Blackmun.

Breyer was generally associated with the liberal wing of the Court.

He is now the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process at Harvard Law School.

Breyer was born on August 15, 1938, in San Francisco, California, to Anne A. (née Roberts) and Irving Gerald Breyer.

Breyer's paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Romania to the United States, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where Breyer's grandfather was born.

Breyer was raised in a middle-class Jewish family.

His father was a lawyer who served as legal counsel to the San Francisco Board of Education.

Breyer and his younger brother Charles R. Breyer, who later became a federal district judge, were active in the Boy Scouts of America and achieved the Eagle Scout rank.

Breyer attended Lowell High School, where he was a member of the Lowell Forensic Society and debated regularly in high school tournaments, including against future California governor Jerry Brown and future Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.

After graduating from high school in 1955, Breyer studied philosophy at Stanford University.

He graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Breyer was awarded a Marshall Scholarship, which he used to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a first-class honors B.A. in 1961.

Born in San Francisco, Breyer attended Stanford University, the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964.

After a clerkship with Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1964–65, Breyer was a law professor and lecturer at Harvard Law School from 1967 until 1980.

He specialized in administrative law, writing textbooks that remain in use today.

He then returned to the United States to attend Harvard Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, magna cum laude.

Breyer spent eight years in the United States Army Reserve including six months on active duty in the Army Strategic Intelligence.

After law school, Breyer served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg from 1964 to 1965.

He served briefly as a fact-checker for the Warren Commission, then spent two years in the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division as a special assistant to its Assistant Attorney General.

He reached the rank of corporal and was honorably discharged in 1965.

In 1967, Breyer married The Honourable Joanna Freda Hare, a psychologist and member of the British aristocracy, younger daughter of John Hare, 1st Viscount Blakenham and granddaughter of Richard Hare, 4th Earl of Listowel.

They have three adult children: Chloe, an Episcopal priest; Nell; and Michael.

In 1967, Breyer returned to Harvard Law School as an assistant professor.

In 1970, Breyer wrote "The Uneasy Case for Copyright", one of the most widely cited skeptical examinations of copyright.

Breyer was a visiting professor at the College of Law in Sydney, Australia, the University of Rome, and the Tulane University Law School.

While teaching at Harvard, Breyer took several leaves of absence to serve in the U.S. government.

He held other prominent positions before being nominated to the Supreme Court, including special assistant to the United States Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973.

He served as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973.

Breyer was a special counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary from 1974 to 1975 and served as chief counsel of the committee from 1979 to 1980.

Breyer became a federal judge in 1980, when he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

He taught at Harvard Law until 1980, and held a joint appointment at Harvard Kennedy School from 1977 to 1980.

At Harvard, Breyer was known as a leading expert on administrative law.

While there, he wrote two highly influential books on deregulation: Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation and Regulation and Its Reform.

In his 2005 book Active Liberty, Breyer made his first attempt to systematically communicate his views on legal theory, arguing that the judiciary should seek to resolve issues in a manner that encourages popular participation in governmental decisions.

On January 27, 2022, Breyer and President Joe Biden announced Breyer's intention to retire from the Supreme Court.

On February 25, 2022, Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and one of Breyer's former law clerks, to succeed him.

The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, 2022, by a vote of 53–47.

Breyer remained on the Supreme Court until June 30, 2022.

Breyer wrote majority opinions in landmark Supreme Court cases such as Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. and Google v. Oracle and notable dissents questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty in cases such as Glossip v. Gross.