Justice Stephen Breyer has written and joined major opinions reflecting deep respect for the rights and sensibilities of religious traditionalists.
“There is increasing evidence, however, that the death penalty as now applied lacks that requisite reliability,” he wrote, in an opinion joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.While the nation focuses on whether the Supreme Court will take a conservative turn following Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, Breyer is maintaining his effort to scale back or end the death penalty.Evans and Jordan’s cases out of Mississippi, he continued, “illustrate the first two of these problems.” He added that he also was writing “to highlight additional evidence” about the third problem.The unreliability question was one of three areas that Breyer spent 40 pages addressing. Justice Stephen Breyer warned that his colleagues may be too eager to overturn rulings that he said deserve respect as established precedent, mentioning a key abortion ruling as one of them. At the end of the decade, he became the Judiciary Committee's chief counsel.Breyer has several interests outside of law, including cooking and bicycling.
The general consensus on Stephen Breyer (born 1938), the 108th member of the United States Supreme Court, is that he has a brilliant legal mind. Justice Stephen Breyer even wrote in one dissent ... Breyer and the other liberal justices may soon get an answer on just how far the conservative justices are willing to go. That media labels do not accurately reflect the jurisprudential inclinations of the justices is not terribly surprising. In the nine cases that split 5–4 along ideological lines in the Court’s past term, Justice Breyer wrote four dissenting opinions — only one less than Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan combined.Breyer’s constitutional views were largely unknown when he joined the Supreme Court, but as a Justice he has voted to adopt a narrow interpretation of many constitutionally protected liberties. His father, Irving, was legal counsel for the San Francisco Board … 'Breyer occasionally sides with his conservative colleagues, most notably in a 2014 decision that upheld a Michigan constitutional amendment that bans affirmative action in admissions to the state's public universities. The couple married in 1967, and they have three children.Nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history.After serving on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, in 1973, Breyer was appointed special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he earned accolades for his bipartisan efforts to deregulate the airline industry. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote.Breyer’s apparent ascendance as doyen of the Court’s liberal wing threatens to roll back decades of these pro‐liberty precedents, and to destroy the consensus on the Court that freedom of speech and other essential rights must not be sacrificed to the shifting whims of legislative majorities. Instead, he focused on the government’s interest in censoring speech deemed harmful to minors.Receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications.But Breyer didn’t simply defer to the legislature’s reasons for restricting speech — he made up his own! The final area — “in part a problem that the Constitution’s own demands create,” Breyer acknowledged — is excessive delays that Breyer, like retired Justice John Paul Stevens before him, believes lead to “a third independent constitutional problem.”The addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the court, as well, did not lead to a change in Breyer’s "steady ahead" approach.Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony KennedyFor these reasons, Breyer concluded, “I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment.” He, with support from Ginsburg, called for a “full briefing” on that “more basic question.”Less than a month later, Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died and, for a time, it seemed that those aggressive advocates might have a path ahead.
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'Displaying a formidable intellect at an early age, Breyer was known as the "troop brain" among his fellow Eagle Scouts. Stephen Gerald Breyer (/ ˈ b r aɪ . While the nation focuses on whether the Supreme Court will take a conservative turn following Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, Breyer is …