40 Fun Facts About Stephen Breyer

Stephen Breyer and his brother Charles both earned which rank in the Boy Scouts of America as boys?

Eagle Scout is the rank both Breyer brothers reached, and in 2007 Stephen received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award, given for eminence in a later career.

Which former Stephen Breyer law clerk took over his Supreme Court seat when he retired?

Ketanji Brown Jackson clerked for Breyer from 1999 to 2000, then replaced her old boss 22 years later as the first Black woman on the Court.

Which hobby left Stephen Breyer with a punctured lung, a broken collarbone and a replaced shoulder?

Bicycling injured Breyer badly three times: a car hit him in 1993, he broke his collarbone in 2011, and a 2013 fall on the National Mall led to shoulder surgery.

An intruder robbed Stephen Breyer at his Caribbean vacation home in 2012 while armed with which weapon?

A machete was the weapon, and the robber fled the Breyers' house on the island of Nevis with about $1,000 in cash, leaving everyone unharmed.

Stephen Breyer interviewed for a Supreme Court seat in 1993, but the nomination went to whom instead?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg got the 1993 nomination; Breyer had interviewed while short of breath and in pain from an injury days earlier, and his own turn came a year later.

As a young law professor, Stephen Breyer was an assistant special prosecutor on which political scandal?

Watergate pulled Breyer out of the classroom in 1973, when he joined the special prosecution force during one of several leaves for government service.

Which president first put Stephen Breyer on the bench, fourteen years before his Supreme Court nomination?

Jimmy Carter nominated Breyer to an appeals court nine days after losing the 1980 election, and the Senate still confirmed him 80 to 10 within a month.

Stephen Breyer's younger brother Charles followed him into the law and took which job in California?

Federal judge became Charles Breyer's title too, on a district court, and Stephen stepped aside from appeals of cases his brother had tried.

Stephen Breyer's 2021 opinion in Google v. Oracle let Android reuse code from which programming language?

Java interfaces copied into Android counted as fair use, Breyer wrote for the majority, comparing that kind of code to a library's Dewey Decimal System.

Stephen Breyer's 2021 Mahanoy opinion sided with a cheerleader punished for a profane post on which app?

Snapchat is where the student vented off campus after missing the varsity squad, and Breyer wrote that schools generally cannot punish that kind of speech.

Which president nominated Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court, where he then served for 28 years?

Bill Clinton chose Breyer in 1994, and the Senate confirmed him 87 to 9, helped by goodwill from both parties for his earlier work as a Senate lawyer.

Stephen Breyer was born in which California city, where his father was the school board's lawyer?

San Francisco is where Breyer grew up and attended Lowell High School, debating against a future governor of the state, Jerry Brown.

In his final term, Stephen Breyer co-wrote a joint dissent against the overturning of which landmark ruling?

Roe v. Wade fell in the Dobbs decision days before Breyer left the bench, and he, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan signed a single dissent together.

Stephen Breyer was seen as the intellectual counterweight to which conservative justice, a champion of textualism?

Antonin Scalia set out his method in a 1997 book, and the book Breyer published eight years later is widely read as a reply to it.

Stephen Breyer was the swing vote in 2005 that kept which religious display on the Texas State Capitol grounds?

Ten Commandments displays split the Court twice in one day: Breyer voted to keep the Texas monument, in place since 1961, but against copies hung in Kentucky courthouses.

In his 2015 Glossip v. Gross dissent, Stephen Breyer argued that which punishment is probably unconstitutional?

The death penalty itself, not just the lethal injection drug at issue, was Breyer's target, and he read his dissent aloud from the bench when the ruling was announced.

Stephen Breyer was one of four dissenters in which 2000 case that halted a presidential election recount?

Bush v. Gore ended Florida's recount, though Breyer and David Souter had proposed letting the state finish it under one uniform statewide standard.

Stephen Breyer earned a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics at which English university?

Oxford hosted Breyer for two years at Magdalen College between his American degrees, and he later married into a British family.

As a Senate lawyer, Stephen Breyer helped shape a 1978 law that deregulated which American industry?

Airlines lost the federal board that had decided which routes each carrier could fly; the 1978 act phased it out, and it shut its doors for good at the end of 1984.

Stephen Breyer was the first Supreme Court justice to play an NPR comedy news quiz, where his questions covered what?

Rock stars were the subject when Breyer played Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! in 2007, a show his brother had volunteered him for.

Stephen Breyer took the Supreme Court seat of which Nixon appointee, who retired in 1994?

Harry Blackmun, chosen by a Republican president, had become one of the Court's most liberal justices, the wing Breyer then joined.

Fresh out of law school, Stephen Breyer clerked for which Supreme Court justice, a former labor secretary?

Arthur Goldberg left the Court in 1965, right after Breyer's clerkship year, to become ambassador to the United Nations.

Before joining the Justice Department, Stephen Breyer briefly worked as a fact-checker for which 1960s federal inquiry?

Warren Commission staff produced the 888-page report on the 1963 assassination of the president, and Breyer's fact-checking stint came just before his antitrust job.

Stephen Breyer served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee under which Massachusetts senator?

Ted Kennedy chaired the committee and, in 1994, lobbied hard for his former counsel to get the Supreme Court nomination.

Stephen Breyer studied philosophy at which California university, graduating in 1959 with highest honors?

Stanford gave Breyer a philosophy degree and Phi Beta Kappa membership before he went abroad for a second bachelor's degree.

Which award, a British thank-you for postwar American aid, paid for Stephen Breyer's studies in England?

Marshall Scholarship awards were created by the British Parliament in 1953, and the program later gave Breyer a medal for strengthening ties between the two countries.

Stephen Breyer spent eight years in the Army Reserve during the Vietnam era and left with which rank?

Corporal was as high as Breyer rose; his eight years included six months of active duty in Army intelligence before an honorable discharge in 1965.

Stephen Breyer's wife, Joanna Hare, the daughter of a British viscount, built a career in which profession?

Psychologist Joanna Hare married Breyer in 1967; her father was the 1st Viscount Blakenham and her grandfather an earl.

Stephen Breyer was raised in a Reform Jewish family; his daughter Chloe was ordained as what?

An Episcopal priest is what Chloe Breyer became; she is one of three children Stephen and Joanna Breyer raised, alongside Nell and Michael.

As chief judge of a federal appeals court, Stephen Breyer oversaw the building of a new courthouse in which city?

Boston got its waterfront federal courthouse in 1999, and Breyer credits the project with sparking his lasting interest in architecture.

Stephen Breyer's interest in building design led him to chair the jury of which top architecture award?

Pritzker Prize is often called the Nobel of architecture, and Breyer took over as jury chair from the architect Glenn Murcutt.

On a federal commission in the 1980s, Stephen Breyer helped write the first national version of what?

Sentencing guidelines were meant to make punishments uniform from one courtroom to the next, and Breyer defended them for the rest of his career.

Which 2005 Stephen Breyer book argues that judges should help citizens take part in their own government?

Active Liberty takes its title from Breyer's term for the freedom to participate in government, which he sets beside freedom from government coercion.

Stephen Breyer's 2024 book Reading the Constitution explains why he chose which approach over textualism?

Pragmatism, for Breyer, means weighing a law's purpose and the real-world consequences of a ruling, two tools he says textualists leave out.

At oral argument, Stephen Breyer was known for asking lawyers long, winding questions built around what?

Hypotheticals were Breyer's way of testing how a ruling would play out in the real world, and he kept posing them when he returned to judging in 2025.

As a young professor in 1970, Stephen Breyer wrote a widely cited article questioning the case for what?

Copyright drew Breyer's skepticism for the rest of his career: decades later, as a justice, he dissented from rulings that upheld retroactive extensions of it.

Stephen Breyer taught which legal field at Harvard and co-wrote a widely used casebook on it?

Administrative law, the rules governing federal agencies, stayed Breyer's academic home: on retiring from the Court he returned to Harvard as a professor of the subject.

After retiring from the Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer returned in 2025 to hear cases on which appeals court?

First Circuit judges got back a former chief: Breyer led that court in the early 1990s, and retired justices may still sit on lower federal courts by designation.

Stephen Breyer's paternal great-grandfather emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, from which European country?

Romania was the family's starting point; the Breyers settled in Cleveland, where the justice's grandfather was born, two generations before Stephen's own birth in California.

As a young law clerk, Stephen Breyer wrote the first draft of a concurrence in which 1965 privacy case?

Griswold v. Connecticut protected married couples' use of contraceptives, and the concurrence Breyer drafted grounded the right to privacy in the Ninth Amendment.