Biography on Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer

Essay by tropictangoHigh School, 12th gradeA+, February 2005

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Stephen G. Breyer was born into a Jewish, Democratic, and politically involved family in California August 8th, 1938. His mother was a member of the San Francisco Democratic Party and for the League of Women Voters, and his father was a lawyer and legal counsel for the San Francisco Board of Education. He attended Lowell High School in San Francisco and later was accepted by both Harvard and Stanford. He decided to go to Stanford, and later won a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford University. There he studied economics. Later on he studied law at Harvard.

Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg selected Stephen Breyer as his clerk for the 1964 to 1965 term of the Supreme Court. Breyer helped Authur Goldberg draft an opinion in the landmark right-to-privacy case, Griswold v. Connecticut. He then worked in the Justice Department's anti-trust division for a few years. He returned to Harvard, after getting married, to teach regulatory law, and then worked for a few months as an aide to Archibald Cox in the Watergate prosecutions.

Massachusetts Senator Kennedy invited Breyer to work as legal council to the Judiciary Committee.

On the Judiciary Committee he worked hard to end governmental regulation of the airline industry. His economic solution resulted in airline deregulation. His position and dedication already won him enough Republican supporters so that he received a seat on the federal appeals court when Ronald Reagan was president. Years later he joined the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 1985.

He believed in parental notification for teenage abortions and rejected federal guidelines that prevented health officials at public clinics from advising abortion. He was an advocate of cutting government regulation, not as advantageous for businesses, but as in the interest of the people. He later changed his position and became pro-business. He was appointed as...