Stephen Breyer

Born on Aug. 15, 1938, in San Francisco, Calif., Stephen Breyer was raised in a middle-class Jewish family. Irving, his father, was a legal counsel for the San Francisco Board of Education, and Anne, his mother, volunteered for the League of Women Voters. Watching his parents from afar, he developed an understanding for the importance of public service. In his early years, Breyer and his younger brother, Charles, who went on to become a federal district judge, were Eagle Scouts of San Francisco's Troop 14, and fellow scouts referred to Breyer as the "troop brain." Later in life, in 2007, Breyer was honored with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award by the Boy Scouts of America. While attending Lowell High School in San Francisco, he joined the debate team and debated against others who would go on to have distinguished careers. When he graduated in 1955, his classmates voted him as the person to most likely succeed. After moving on from high school, he earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1959 before attending Oxford University's Magdalen College as a Marshall Scholar. He returned to the U.S. to enroll at Harvard Law School. He joined the Harvard Law Review before graduating magna cum laude in 1964. After graduating, he clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Arthur J. Goldberg for the 1964-65 term and went on to become special assistant to the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. In 1967, he returned to Harvard Law, where he became well-known as a law professor and lecturer. During his early years as an assistant professor, he met psychologist Joanna Hare, the daughter of British Conservative Party leader John Hare. They married and had three children. While he focused on administrative law, he also wrote a number of influential textbooks. Although he was a busy man, he served as an assistant prosecutor during the Watergate hearings, which eventually led to him being appointed special counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1973, a role in which he earned accolades for his bipartisan efforts to deregulate the airline industry. At the end of the decade, he became the Judiciary Committee's chief counsel. Breyer took office as a judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in December 1980. He joined the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 1985, and in 1990, he was named chief judge of the Court of Appeals and a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States. His lifelong dream was met when he was nominated to the Supreme Court as a replacement for Harry Blackmun by President Bill Clinton and sworn in on Aug. 3, 1994. He had several interests outside of law, including cooking and bicycling, and he authored several books about federal regulation.