“He said, ‘I don’t want somebody appointed who will just reverse everything I’ve done for the last 25 years,’” Justice Breyer recalled. “That will ine
“He said, ‘I don’t want somebody appointed who will just reverse everything I’ve done for the last 25 years,’” Justice Breyer recalled. “That will inevitably be in the psychology” of his decision, he said.
“I don’t think I’m going to stay there till I die — hope not,” he said.
Over the years, Justice Breyer bristled at the accusation that judges act politically. “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said in April in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”
On the bench, his demeanor was professorial, and his rambling questions, often studded with colorful hypotheticals, could be charming or exasperating. But they demonstrated a lively curiosity and an open mind.
If Mr. Biden succeeds in winning confirmation for his nominee to replace Justice Breyer, that justice is very likely to serve for decades.
Speculation about whom Mr. Biden might nominate has centered on two possibilities: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who graduated from Harvard Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Breyer, and Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court, who graduated from Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens.
Some of Mr. Biden’s supporters have urged him to cast his net wider and to consider candidates without Ivy League degrees or Supreme Court clerkships but with a diversity of experience.
They pointed to, for instance, Judge J. Michelle Childs of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., a graduate of the University of South Carolina’s law school and a former law firm partner who also worked in state government. In December, Mr. Biden said he would name Judge Childs to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit, a sign that she may be a serious contender for Justice Breyer’s seat.
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