Breyer, Stephen Gerald (1938-…), served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1994 to 2022. President Bill Clinton appointed Breyer to fill the vacancy created when Justice Harry A. Blackmun retired.
As a Supreme Court justice, Breyer avoided taking sweeping or extreme positions on issues before the court. Although he often voted with the court’s liberal bloc, his arguments favored pragmatic (practical) reasoning over idealistic notions.
Breyer was born on Aug. 15, 1938, in San Francisco. He graduated from Stanford University in 1959. He then spent two years at Oxford University in England as a Marshall scholar. The British-sponsored Marshall Scholarships allow U.S. citizens to study in the United Kingdom. In 1964, he graduated from Harvard Law School.
In 1964 and 1965, Breyer served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. Breyer began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1967. In 1979 and 1980, he was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In November 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Breyer to serve as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Breyer became chief judge of the appeals court in 1990.
Breyer has written several books, including Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (2006); America’s Supreme Court: Making Democracy Work (2010); and The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (2015).
In January 2022, Breyer announced that he intended to retire from the court after the court’s summer recess that year and after the confirmation of his successor. In April, Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed by the Senate as Breyer’s successor. Jackson took Breyer’s place on the court when she was sworn in as an associate justice in late June.
