Breyer, Stephen Gerald

Related Category: Supreme Court: Biographies

(brī´ər), 1938–, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1994–), b. San Francisco. A graduate of Stanford and Oxford universities and of 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. Breyer is regarded as a cautious, moderate jurist, although on the conservative Court of the 1990s he has been one of the more liberal members. 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.