Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 99

on political books
Justice Stephen
Breyer Lives
in a World
of His Own
The brilliant jurist's surprisingly (or
not) weak case for the Supreme
Court's historic legitimacy.
By Garrett Epps
The Authority of the Court
and the Peril of Politics
T
en years in the Supreme Court press gallery leaves one with a few surreal memories.
In 2012, for example, former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, arguing against
an FCC fine for showing brief nudity on network TV, pointed at the marble courtroom
frieze above the startled justices' heads: " There's a bare buttock there, " he said, " and
there's a bare buttock here. " In 2011, the Kansas corrections official Margie Phelps,
defending her father's homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, argued that the First
Amendment covers even direct harassment unless it is " approaching an individual
up close and in their grill to berate them " -leaving the aged justices visibly puzzled
about why anyone would interfere with an outdoor barbecue. In 2016, Justice Clarence
Thomas produced gasps in the courtroom when he broke a decade-long silence to
defend the Second Amendment " rights " of domestic abusers.
And in 2012, Justice Stephen Breyer, in his unforgettable vocal mash-up of Edward
Everett Horton and Mr. Rogers's King Friday XIII, told the lawyer for an American
citizen tortured to death by the Palestinian Authority, " I think I have to say that you
are on a weak wicket. "
Breyer's legal point was well taken (the victim's family eventually lost, 9-0). Yet
only Stephen Breyer, the Oxford-educated son-in-law of the Viscount Blakenham,
would have bowled a cricket metaphor at an unsuspecting American lawyer.
But fast bowling is all in a day's work for Breyer, a justice like no other. I must begin
this piece by confessing my deep admiration for the man's intellectual gifts, his
good nature, and his idiosyncratic sense of humor. His mind is capacious, lightning
fast, and unpredictable. No other justice in history, I dare say, has not only read the
more than 4,000 pages of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu in the original
French, but read them twice, back to back.
While the conservative justices, by and large, won their seats as courtiers to Republican
presidents, Breyer was once a congressional staffer. He knows a great deal
about how legislation is actually created and implemented and does not share the
majority's contempt for elected legislators. Breyer is perhaps the last major advocate
of legal pragmatism-a venerable system of thought that concerns itself first and
foremost not with the abstract meaning of words or the " understanding " attributWashington
Monthly
99
by Stephen Breyer
Harvard University Press, 112 pp.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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