page_title: Stephen Breyer
section_title: Legal career
hierarchical_section_title: Stephen Breyer / Legal career
caption_attribution_description: English: Breyer
context_page_description: Stephen Gerald Breyer is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton on May 17, 1994 and has served since August 3, 1994.
  After a clerkship with Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1964, Breyer became well-known as a law professor and lecturer at Harvard Law School, starting in 1967. There he specialized in administrative law, writing a number of influential textbooks that remain in use today. He held other prominent positions before being nominated for the Supreme Court, including special assistant to the United States Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973. He also served on the First Circuit Court of Appeals from 1980 to 1994.
  In his 2005 book Active Liberty, Breyer made his first attempt to systematically communicate his views on legal theory, arguing that the judiciary should seek to resolve issues in a manner that encourages popular participation in governmental decisions. He is generally associated with the Supreme Court's more liberal side.
context_section_description: Breyer served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg during the 1964 term (list), and served briefly as a fact-checker for the Warren Commission. He worked in the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division as a special assistant to its Assistant Attorney General from 1965 to 1967, and an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in 1973. Breyer was a special counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary from 1974 to 1975 and served as chief counsel of the committee from 1979 to 1980. He worked closely with the chairman of the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, to pass the Airline Deregulation Act that closed the Civil Aeronautics Board.
  Breyer was a lecturer, assistant professor, and law professor at Harvard Law School starting in 1967. He was a professor at Harvard Law until 1980, and held a joint appointment at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from 1977 to 1980. At Harvard, Breyer was known as a leading expert on administrative law. While there, he wrote two highly influential books on deregulation: Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation and Regulation and Its Reform. In 1970, Breyer wrote "The Uneasy Case for Copyright", one of the most widely cited skeptical examinations of copyright. Breyer was a visiting professor at the College of Law in Sydney, Australia, the University of Rome, and the Tulane University Law School.
caption: Breyer speaking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2011
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