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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said Tuesday the high court has more discussion and debate behind closed doors with its two new members. Breyer, though, said the court "seems to be running very well" under Chief Justice John Roberts, and he doesn't think the extra discussion is a major change. "Perhaps it has to do with younger people," Breyer, 67, told reporters at a news conference before he was to speak at the Clinton Library. President Bush's first nominee to the court, 51-year-old Roberts, was sworn in last fall, becoming the nation's youngest chief justice in...

CHICAGO - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer says he frequently makes decisions about a law's constitutionality by considering its purposes and consequences, which puts him at odds with fellow justices who try to adhere strictly to the language of the Constitution. Breyer, on the court since 1994, didn't single out any particular justice or discuss his new colleagues, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, during his speech Tuesday at the University of Chicago Law School. He said, however, that he hadn't detected any split on the high court along Republican and Democratic ideological lines. "I haven't seen that kind of politics...

It ought to be a major intellectual event in constitutional law when a Justice of the Supreme Court comes forward publicly to explain his theory of judging. Explanation is needed, for by now nobody familiar with the work of the Court believes it confines its rulings to the principles of the historic Constitution. There have always been instances when the Court voted its sympathies rather than anything resembling the Constitution, but over the last half century the divergence between the document and the decisions has sharply increased. Indeed, the criticism that the Court routinely departs from the Constitution’s principles, as...

Chloe Breyer serves an Episcopal priest at St. Mary's Manhattanville Church in West Harlem, New York. She is the daughter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and author of The Close, a reflection on her first year at General Theological Seminary in New York City. She is urbane, witty, and articulate. What she is not, however, is theologically orthodox -- a point she makes painfully clear in "The Earthly Father--What if Mary Wasn't a Virgin?," published December 22, 2005 at the on-line magazine, Slate. "At Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of God's only son," Ms. Breyer notes. "Some...

In his book Active Liberty, Justice Stephen Breyer attempts to develop an alternative to the originalist theory of interpretation that has received so much attention in recent years. Rather than interpret the Constitution based on its original meaning, as originalists like Justice Scalia might, Breyer argues that the Constitution should be interpreted to further political participation -- the active liberty of the ancients as opposed to the modern liberty to do as one pleases. Breyer also maintains that the Constitution (and statutes) should be interpreted using a “purposivist” approach -- i.e. that judges should read constitutional provisions based on their...

A curious e-mail is making the rounds from Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy's communications director, Stephanie Cutter, attacking Judge Alito's response last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee's request for more information about Judge Alito's involvement in a case in Vanguard mutual funds was a party in name only. In Monga v. Ottenberg, a bankruptcy receiver sought to have a party's IRA assets (which included funds in a Vanguard account) made available to pay the bankrupt party's creditors. Vanguard was a party to the case because the bankrupt party sued it to prevent it from releasing his IRA funds to his...

In the weeks after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore, on December 12, 2000, the mood was despondent in the chambers of the Justices on the losing side. The five-to-four ruling ended the recount of the Presidential vote in Florida and assured George W. Bush’s victory in the election. “The clerks were tremendously alienated,” one recalled recently. “A lot of them thought that the Court was a fraud, that the place had sacrificed its legitimacy, and that there really wasn’t much point in taking the whole institution seriously anymore.” Stephen G. Breyer was among the dissenting...

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Thank you for joining us today, Justice Breyer. Tell us why you decided to write this book. JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: I wanted to write it because I've learned from really Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, my predecessor Harry Blackmun that there's a tremendous desire for knowledge about the court and how do we actually decide cases? People want to know. It's not the CIA; there's not really a secret. And I wanted to try to help people understand that. And also, I think there's a misconception. I think that many people believe that we're deciding what's good...

<p>That was the vote count when the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer in the 1990s, and it should have been the vote for John Roberts yesterday, instead of 13-5. The two Bill Clinton appointees are every bit as liberal as Judge Roberts is conservative, and they were just as unforthcoming during their confirmation hearings on how they would vote on specific cases.</p>

GEORG HEGEL was a German philosopher of the early 19th century. Hegel believed that history unfolds through a "dialectical" process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity "the absolute idea." History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea.Until recently it appeared that Marxism (which borrowed Hegel's dialectic but replaced "ideas" with economic systems and classes--hence "dialectical materialism") would represent Hegel's most enduring contribution to the...

References to foreign law in Supreme Court opinions have become controversial.... True, the references have increased somewhat, but they remain rare, and no one suggests that the court has directly based any of its interpretations of the Constitution on foreign authority. As the issue was framed recently in a debate between Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, it comes down to this: The former says that if a judge abroad has dealt with a similar problem, "Why don't I read what he says if it's similar enough? Maybe I'll learn something." Yet the latter would exclude such material as wholly...

If the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor opened a gap at the ideological center of the Supreme Court, the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist removed the anchor of its right wing. Yet in what is suddenly a much more complex process of replacing not only O'Connor but also Rehnquist, President Bush has an opportunity to shore up the court's conservative bloc and entrench it. Rehnquist's replacement will probably serve for many years to come; if the new justice's views remain conservative over that time, it will mean the effective perpetuation of a Rehnquist-like vote on the court...

Speaking to a bar association meeting in Las Vegas last week, United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens confessed that he thought one of his own recent opinions, though correct as a matter of law, was wrong as a matter of policy. Stevens authored the majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the forced sale of private homes to a commercial real estate developer. Yet he commented at the meeting that his constitutional judgment in that case was "entirely divorced from my judgment concerning the wisdom of the program."It seems that no one has...

What it is, is; "jurisprudential mysticism" and "more liberal BS"... "Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution" explains Justice Breyer's approach and applies it to some of the most divisive topics that come before the court. These include everything from freedom of speech and privacy rights to affirmative action and last June's Ten Commandments cases, which addressed the constitutionality of religious symbols on government property.

While the ink has hardly set on the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 5-4 ruling in the Kelo vs. New London case, a move is underway to urge Congress to pass a constitutional amendment affording greater protection to property owners from unwanted government intervention for the promotion of economic development. Rep. David Floyd, R-Bardstown, has signed on for a resolution that has made its rounds among Kentucky House minority members. Have the Supremes finally flipped their judicial wigs? Here is some background as well as some key language, from the majority as well as the dissent sides: The Connecticut Supreme Court's...

Justice Breyer's Plainfield Home Eyed for ‘Constitution Park' By David Corriveau Valley News Staff Writer Plainfield -- If the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire and its allies have their way, someday two stone monuments will stand on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer's Plainfield property. Short of that, the Libertarians hope to cause Breyer some discomfort for his vote last month on a controversial court decision freeing cities and towns to take land and turn it over to private developers. They are planning a petition drive asking Plainfield voters to take Breyer's 167-acre vacation retreat by eminent domain at...

PLAINFIELD, N.H. - Libertarians upset about a Supreme Court ruling on land taking have proposed seizing a justice's vacation home and turning it into a park, echoing efforts aimed at another justice who lives in the state. Organizers are trying to collect enough signatures to go before the town next spring to ask to use Justice Stephen G. Breyer's 167-acre Plainfield property for a "Constitution Park" with stone monuments to commemorate the U.S. and New Hampshire constitutions. "In the spirit of the ruling, we're recreating the same use of eminent domain," said John Babiarz, the Libertarian Party's state chairman. The...

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryJuly 16, 2005 President's Radio Address      Audio      THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Under the Constitution, I have the responsibility to nominate a successor to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. This past week I met with Democratic and Republican leaders in the United States Senate and sought their views on the process, and their thoughts on the qualities to look for in a potential nominee. Also, my staff has talked with more than 60 members of the United States Senate. Members of the Senate are receiving a full opportunity to provide their opinions and...

Innovations on Socialist Architecture: The New U.S. Federal Courthouse as "Globalist Realism" New Republican Archive. James F. Burke. The new Federal Courthouse in Boston is the building many joke about. Office-workers in downtown Boston must live with it everyday, as they look down upon its strange-looking structure from high office windows. Many are utterly repulsed by its shape and ugly red-brick facade. Without that facade, that is, stripped to its basic shape and form (imagine it with basic white concrete for the purposes of this exercise), the building is unmistakably Stalinist in design. The only pleasing view of it is...