Stephen Breyer Quotes

The advantages? Exercise, no parking problems, gas prices, it's fun. An automobile is expensive. You have to find a place to park and it's not fun. So why not ride a bicycle? I recommend it.

To threaten the institution is to threaten fair administration of justice and protection of liberty.

There are loads of countries that have nice written constitutions like ours. But there aren't loads of countries where they're followed.

This understanding, underlying constitutional interpretation since the New Deal, reflects the Constitution's demands for structural flexibility sufficient to adapt substantive laws and institutions to rapidly changing social, economic, and technological conditions.

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

It's important to every American that the law protect his or her basic liberty

Active liberty is particularly at risk when law restricts speech directly related to the shaping of public opinion, for example, speech that takes place in areas related to politics and policy-making by elected officials. That special risk justifies especially strong pro-speech judicial presumptions. It also justifies careful review whenever the speech in question seeks to shape public opinion, particularly if that opinion in turn will affect the political process and the kind of society in which we live.

The best clue to what a person thinks is what he says.

I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.

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

Independence doesn't mean you decide the way you want.

People have to be educated and they have to stick to it. If people lose that respect, an awful lot is lost

Every citizen has to figure out what kind of government he or she wants.

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?

It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.

Independence means you decide according to the law and the facts.

I mean, there are lots of people who get married who can't have children. To take a state that does allow adoption and say-there, what is the justification for saying no gay marriage? Certainly not the one you said, is it?

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

Nobody wants a judge to be subject to the political whim of the moment.

We are selected, but I grew up in California and in San Francisco and there was a system of electing judges.

But once the person is selected, at that point that person is independent.

Judges are appointed often through the political process