to take account of the statistics justice breyer was offering, the number of new cases of omicron covid a day, are you telling us there s nothing that can be done about it? i felt it was kind of a turning point actually the way he behaved on the bench in that argument. so interesting getting that view from you. jeff, i m just going to tell you, i ve got 40 seconds for you. as linda was suggesting, justice breyer was not a notorious rbg. he was not a sexy justice. he only of late has gotten so frustrated it s really a measure of how far the country has come and how much the institutions of government, not just the supreme court but the senate itself, have changed. and one can only hope that instead of being viewed as a throwback, perhaps in the future he will be viewed as a model to get us back to a time when
institution. his work in the senate, for senator kennedy, who really was his sponsor to the supreme court, taught him how congress can work when it did work. it was a time when you agreed when you could and fought only when you had to. he would meet with his counterpart on senator thurmond s staff every week and figure out where they could get common ground. so as a jurist, he brought that background to the court that was a pragmatic sense, how do we make the law work as an institution so that democracy works for the people? the wisconsin case you cited is an example of that. jeff, how do you go ahead, linda. i was going to say, when he was chief judge of the first circuit for federal appeals court in boston, there were
linda, i start with you as someone who follows the court, i have been reading you basically my whole adult life and you know these issues inside and out. let s start with your thoughts on justice breyer s contributions and anything about the way forward. yes, so i called justice breyer sort of the last enlightened man in an unenlightened age, and by that i meant someone who really believes in the power of facts, expertise. in his prejudicial life, he was a administrator of law and facts really matter. he finds himself on a court where facts seem to matter less and less. so he did write a number of important opinions, but his voice, as i respond to it, has really been in dissent. and i think he looking ahead realized that s the way it was going to be.
powerful and comes across to some people as a little cool and sophisticated and aloof but there s a real passion he s brought to the court. you mentioned the death penalty cases, and that s certainly true. but on other things too, on equal protection, definitely, and he s written important he s an important voice as the court has moved ever so slightly and now kind of reached a climax to his right. jeff, what can you tell us about him and his work? i think justice breyer, as linda was suggesting, is literally a throwback to an era where institutions worked. he came up at harvard at a time that the faculty, almost exclusively white males, believed in the law as an
in the record and wasn t totally true was just sprinkled around, which cuts against everything you re taught about court rules? linda first. i think he tried as the clip you had earlier suggested, tried to work with everybody, really believed in the power of persuasion, the power pa of logic. just give me the facts, give me the law and i will show you how it adds up. when that didn t work, when there was an increasing gap between where the law should have been leading the court and where the court ended up, i m share that was an occasion of extreme frustration, and i think the vaccine case really exemplified it. he just radiated such anger from the bench, unusually from him, from the bench during the argument in that case when the lawyer challenging the employer vaccine rule didn t seem willing