© 2024 Connecticut Public

FCC Public Inspection Files:
WEDH · WEDN · WEDW · WEDY · WNPR
WPKT · WRLI-FM · WEDW-FM · Public Files Contact
ATSC 3.0 FAQ
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Justice Stephen Breyer, an influential liberal on the Supreme Court, to retire

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring after serving more than two decades on the nation's highest court, White House and Supreme Court sources tell NPR.

Breyer — professorial, practical, and moderately liberal — wrote many of the court's legally important but less glamorous decisions and sought, behind the scenes, to build consensus for centrist decisions on a conservative court.

Breyer's retirement gives President Biden his first opportunity to name a new justice to the court. During the 2020 campaign, he pledged to name an African American woman if he got the chance. The two leading contenders are said to be federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was on President Obama's shortlist for the court in 2016, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, who served as assistant, and then deputy solicitor general in both Democratic and Republican administrations prior to her nomination to California's highest court.

Both women are young, in terms of Supreme Court appointment. And both have stellar legal credentials.

Justice Stephen Breyer, photographed in 2015.
Ariel Zambelich / NPR
/
NPR
Justice Stephen Breyer, photographed in 2015.

Breyer, though not a household name, has been an important figure on the Supreme Court for more than a quarter century.

Perhaps his most publicly well-known decision came in 2016 when he wrote the court's abortion opinion striking down a Texas law, copied in other states, that closed nearly half the clinics in the state without any demonstrable safety justification. The decision dispassionately dissected and demolished the state's claim that its motive was to protect women's health and safety. It had no majestic language, but its effect was profound in reaffirming the rights of women to terminate pregnancies.

In many respects, Breyer's monuments were not so much the decisions that he authored as the decisions that he influenced. Behind the scenes, he pushed and prodded his fellow justices for consensus on everything from Obamacare to affirmative action in higher education.

He believed in persuasion and viewed a dissent as a failed opinion. But he did dissent, and sometimes passionately — for example, in 2007 when a five-justice majority struck down voluntary school desegregation plans in Louisville, Ky., where the schools had once been segregated by law, and in Seattle, where they had been segregated in practice.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: January 26, 2022 at 12:00 AM EST
An earlier version of this story said Breyer is 84 years old. He is 83.
Corrected: January 26, 2022 at 12:00 AM EST
An earlier version of this story said Breyer is 84 years old. He is 83.
Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.

Stand up for civility

This news story is funded in large part by Connecticut Public’s Members — listeners, viewers, and readers like you who value fact-based journalism and trustworthy information.

We hope their support inspires you to donate so that we can continue telling stories that inform, educate, and inspire you and your neighbors. As a community-supported public media service, Connecticut Public has relied on donor support for more than 50 years.

Your donation today will allow us to continue this work on your behalf. Give today at any amount and join the 50,000 members who are building a better—and more civil—Connecticut to live, work, and play.

Related Content