Stephen Breyer
US Supreme Court justice from 1994 to 2022
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| 2025 | Breyer attended the second inauguration of Donald Trump, appearing with the nine sitting Supreme Court justices. |
| 2025 | Breyer returned to the bench in the First Circuit Court of Appeals as a retired Supreme Court justice. |
| March 26 2024 | Breyer released a fourth book, 'Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism', discussing his preference for a pragmatic approach over textualism in judicial interpretation. |
| 2022 | Breyer dissented in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case that overturned Roe v. Wade. |
| July 2 2022 | On July 2, 2022, it was announced that Breyer had been appointed Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process at Harvard Law School. |
| June 30 2022 | Stephen Breyer officially retired from the Supreme Court, and Ketanji Brown Jackson succeeded him. |
| April 7 2022 | The U.S. Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court by a vote of 53–47. |
| February 25 2022 | President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed Breyer on the Supreme Court. |
| January 27 2022 | Breyer and President Joe Biden announced Breyer's intention to retire from the Supreme Court. |
| January 26 2022 | News outlets reported that Breyer intended to retire at the end of the 2021–22 Supreme Court term. |
| 2021 | Breyer joined Kagan's dissent in Brnovich v. DNC, a case that upheld Arizona's ban on ballot harvesting and the refusal to count out-of-precinct ballots, with Breyer likely assigning the dissenting opinion to Kagan as the most senior dissenter. |
| September 2021 | He participated in an interview on Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN where he discussed his judicial philosophy and retirement plans. |
| September 2021 | Breyer addressed calls for his retirement during an interview with Fox News, stating that he hadn't decided to retire based on pressure and was considering multiple factors. |
| September 2021 | Breyer appeared on Stephen Colbert's TV show on the Late Show to discuss his views on the Texas Heartbeat Act and reflected on his retirement. |
| August 2021 | In an interview with the New York Times, Stephen Breyer expressed his desire to retire before his death and reflected on a conversation with Justice Antonin Scalia about the implications of a successor reversing a significant amount of his work. |
| June 23 2021 | Breyer authored the majority opinion in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., addressing off-campus student speech, where he recognized the limited authority of schools to regulate such speech and concluded that the punishment for profanity on social media did not amount to a substantial disruption of school activities. |
| June 17 2021 | Breyer wrote the 7-2 majority opinion in California v. Texas, holding that Texas and other states lacked standing to sue against the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. |
| April 5 2021 | Breyer wrote the majority opinion in Google v. Oracle, determining that Google's copying of Java declaring code constituted fair use, specifically due to its fundamental role in programming compatibility. |
| March 4 2021 | Breyer dissented in United States Fish and Wildlife Serv. v. Sierra Club, Inc., arguing against the majority ruling that limited environmental groups' access to government documents under FOIA. |
| 2020 | Breyer joined a dissenting opinion by Ginsburg in RNC v. DNC, which overturned a lower court's decision that had extended a voting deadline in the Wisconsin primary elections due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| December 18 2020 | Stephen Breyer was one of three dissenters in Trump v. New York, where he argued against the Court's decision to sidestep the case concerning the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the census. In his dissent, he emphasized the importance of ruling in favor of the challengers and highlighted the failures of the Trump administration's late attempts to implement the exclusion. |
| October 2020 | In October, Breyer dissented in a similar case regarding Wisconsin's mail-in ballots, where the Court refused to require the counting of mail-in ballots received up to six days after Election Day. |
| July 2020 | In July 2020, Stephen Breyer reiterated his position on the death penalty, suggesting that the Supreme Court may need to examine whether it violates the Constitution. |
| July 31 2020 | Breyer dissented in a 5–4 Supreme Court decision that allowed construction of the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border to continue. He expressed concern over the environmental impacts of the wall, including threats to wildlife and water flow. |
| June 29 2020 | Breyer wrote the plurality opinion in June Medical Services v. Russo, striking down Louisiana's abortion law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. |
| April 23 2020 | Breyer wrote the majority opinion in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, determining that the County of Maui must obtain a permit under the Clean Water Act for releasing groundwater pollution into the ocean. |
| 2019 | In the case of Department of Commerce v. New York, Stephen Breyer was part of the 5–4 majority ruling that the Census Bureau had not followed proper procedure regarding the implementation of a citizenship question. He also expressed that the question was unconstitutional. |
| June 2019 | In Rucho v. Common Cause, Breyer dissented against the Supreme Court's 5–4 decision that deemed gerrymandering a non-justiciable issue, reiterating his concerns about the implications of such a ruling. |
| 2018 | Breyer was appointed chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury, succeeding Glenn Murcutt. |
| February 21 2018 | Breyer wrote for the majority in Class v. United States, ruling that individuals who have pleaded guilty can still challenge the constitutionality of a federal law, thus allowing Class to appeal the questioned indictments despite his prior admission of guilt. |
| 2015 | He published 'The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities', analyzing the relationship between U.S. law and global legal realities. |
| 2015 | Stephen Breyer broke a federal law by hearing a case related to Johnson Controls after his wife sold approximately $33,000 worth of stock in the company. This action was taken to bring him back into compliance. |
| 2015 | Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion in Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, ruling that racial gerrymandering claims must be evaluated district by district, leading to the striking down of four Alabama state Senate districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. |
| 2015 | Stephen Breyer dissented in the Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross, where he questioned the constitutionality of the death penalty itself, stating that it is highly likely to violate the Eighth Amendment. |
| June 22 2015 | In Kingsley v. Hendrickson, Breyer authored the majority opinion stating that a pretrial detainee must prove excessive force by an objective standard, emphasizing the protection of pretrial detainees from 'objectively unreasonable' force by state actors. |
| June 22 2015 | Breyer wrote the majority opinion in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, establishing that pretrial detainees must prove excessive police force using an objective standard. He clarified that the Due Process Clause protects detainees from 'objectively unreasonable' force by state actors. |
| June 18 2015 | Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, asserting that license plates are considered governmental speech, subject to regulation, and highlighting the role of government in conveying messages through such mediums. |
| June 25 2014 | In American Broadcasting Cos., Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., Breyer delivered the majority opinion, ruling that Aereo violated copyright by providing near-live streams of television, likening its operations to those of cable companies. |
| 2013 | Breyer joined Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, where the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. |
| 2012 | Stephen Breyer expressed similar concerns in his dissent during Golan v. Holder, reaffirming his views on the implications of copyright extensions. |
| March 20 2012 | Stephen Breyer wrote for a unanimous court in Mayo v. Prometheus, ruling that patent claims relating to diagnostic methods of natural phenomena were not patentable, emphasizing the necessity of an 'inventive concept' beyond natural laws. |
| June 21 2011 | Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority in the case Turner v. Rogers, addressing the requirement for legal counsel or safeguards in civil contempt cases, stressing that adequate safeguards must be provided by the state to prevent erroneous deprivation of liberty. |
| 2010 | Stephen Breyer generally voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act since its passage. |
| 2010 | Breyer released his second book, 'Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View', discussing the six interpretive tools that judges can utilize in their reasoning. |
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