Word: breyers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...involved a recently-installed display in a Kentucky courthouse, and the other was about a monument that had been outside the state capital in Texas for 40 years. The Court struck down the courthouse display and upheld the Texas monument. Both decisions were five-to-four, and Justice Stephen Breyer, who was my administrative law professor at Harvard, was the swing vote. It baffled me, but I finally boiled it down to a philosophy of 'if it's old and outside, it's okay, and if it's new and inside, it's not okay...
...what could the pro-choice crowd possibly find pleasing here? Well, for what it's worth, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a very compelling dissent, joined by three of her liberal colleagues, Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens and David Souter. It's as fiery as anything turned out by conservative rabble-rouser Antonin Scalia, probably the court's best writer. She dismisses the majority's logic as "bewildering," the product of old men out of touch: "This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution - ideas that have long since been...
...Breyer provided more speculation as to why Taney wrote such a broad, extreme opinion when a more modest one would have been legally stronger...
...According to Breyer, one potential explanation is that Taney might have tried to cut a deal with Justice Benjamin R. Curtis, a staunch abolitionist, to dismiss the case, but that Curtis’ might have rejected the deal, prompting Taney to take a hard-line position...
...Taney could have responded, ‘Fine, you write what you want, and I’ll write what I want.’” Breyer said. “And then the country’s down the drain...