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Other authors named Stephen:
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Author's popularity: 3
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Popularity: 5
Vote: | And if a judge is going to be criticized for letting off a person and it turns out that person was innocent, that would be a pretty bad criticism. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | And if that independence is seriously eroded, it will be hard to protect those things that this country was based upon. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | And in that confirmation process, I sat for 17 hours in front of a senate judiciary committee. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | And telephone justice is where the party boss calls you up on the telephone and tells you how to decide the case. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | And the problem is once you get into this campaign business and begin to have a lot of money, then the person on the bench begins to think - what's going to happen if I decide the case this way or that way? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | At least there's a political input, but when you put on the robe, at that point the politics is over. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | At the same time, we do live in a democracy. And for that reason I think it is appropriate to have some element of public control. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | But if you have that in the court system, you will then destroy confidence that the judges are deciding things on the merits. . . And as I said our liberties are connected with that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | But once the person is selected, at that point that person is independent. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Every citizen has to figure out what kind of government he or she wants. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I mean those people who are interested in good government will certainly contribute in order to make certain there's some counter-balance to those whose interests in good government is less. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think it shows that if you have one group of people doing it, you'll get another group of people doing it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I thought that that was an effort to inject a popular element, a democratic element into the selection of a person who, once he is selected and confirmed, is beyond electoral control. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Independence doesn't mean you decide the way you want. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Independence means you decide according to the law and the facts. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's because after 80 years of segregation you had a decision of Brown v Board that said people will be treated equally. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's important to every American that the law protect his or her basic liberty. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Judges are appointed often through the political process. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Nobody wants a judge to be subject to the political whim of the moment. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Once you're in a system where there are contributions being made, it's certainly not the case that everybody expects something back. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | People have to be educated and they have to stick to it. If people lose that respect, an awful lot is lost. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There are loads of countries that have nice written constitutions like ours. But there aren't loads of countries where they're followed. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | To threaten the institution is to threaten fair administration of justice and protection of liberty. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Ultimately, the question of campaign contributions will be decided by the public. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We are selected, but I grew up in California and in San Francisco and there was a system of electing judges. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We can speak about the institution, but ultimately the bar is the group that both is in touch with the public on the one hand and understands the judicial institution on the other. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We developed a system of protecting human liberty such that judges and independent judges are a necessary part of that protection. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Well it's fairly important that everyone have a lawyer and so we have a system that you can't convict a person without a lawyer, even if he's guilty. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Well, just that there would be somebody in the office and the voters - it was more or less an understanding in the entire community, as long as that person was doing a good job on the merits, nobody was going to run against him. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Would I want to be judged by whether or not I was popular? Wouldn't I want to be judged on what was true as opposed to what might be popular? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You can have many different selection systems, but the bottom line has to be a system that, once the judge takes office that judge will feel that he or she is to decide the case without reference to the popular thing or the popular will of the moment. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You will read in the newspaper more often about federal courts, but the law that affects people, the trials that affect human beings are by and large in the state courts. |
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Biography
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Justice Stephen Gerald Breyer (born August 15, 1938) has been a US Supreme Court Associate Justice since 1994.
Breyer was born in San Francisco, California. He married Joanna Hare in 1967, and has three children Chloe, Nell, and Michael. He graduated from Lowell High School and received an A.B. from Stanford University, a B.A. from Magdalen College, University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1964 Term, as a Special Assistant to the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Antitrust, 1965-1967, as an Assistant Special Prosecutor of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, 1973, as Special Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 1974-1975, and as Chief Counsel of the committee, 1979-1980.
He was an Assistant Professor, Professor of Law, and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, 1967-1994, a Professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 1977-1980, and a Visiting Professor at the College of Law, Sydney, Australia and at the University of Rome. At Harvard, Breyer was known as a leading expert on administrative law.
From 1980 to 1994, he served as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and as its Chief Judge from 1990 to 1994. He also served as a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States between 1990 and 1994, and the United States Sentencing Commission between 1985 and 1989. On the sentencing commission, Breyer played a key role in reforming federal criminal sentencing procedures, producing the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which were formulated to increase uniformity in sentences for criminal cases.
President Clinton nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in an 87 to 9 vote and he took his seat August 3, 1994.
On the bench, Breyer generally takes a pragmatic approach to constitutional issues, interested more in producing coherence and continuity in the law than in following doctrinal, historical, or textual strictures. Breyer has compiled a generally moderate record on the Court. He is a strong defender of abortion rights and has also urged that the Supreme Court cite international law in its decision. However, Breyer is also deferential to the interests of law enforcement and urges that the Court be deferential to legislative judgments in its First Amendment rulings.
Breyer is well-known for his personal writing style in which he never uses footnotes in his opinions; he feels that keeping all citations inline results in better writing, since one cannot stuff in all kinds of marginally relevant material into footnotes.
External links *Supreme court official bio (PDF)
*LookSmart - Stephen Breyer directory category
*Yahoo - Stephen Breyer directory category
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen Breyer".
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