BREYER, STEPHEN

born Aug. 15, 1938, San Francisco, Calif., U.S. in full Stephen Gerald Breyer associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994. Breyer received bachelor's degrees from Stanford University (1959) and from the University of Oxford (1961), and he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. He served as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court justice Arthur J. Goldberg in 196465. From 1967 he taught at Harvard Law School, and between 1978 and 1981 he was a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 1974 to 1975 Breyer served as special counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and from 1979 to 1981 he was its chief counsel. There he worked on projects such as a federal criminal code and airline and trucking deregulation. In 1980 he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, becoming chief judge in 1990. From 1985 to 1989 he served on the commission that devised guidelines for federal sentencing. In 1994 President William Clinton nominated Breyer to fill the seat of retiring justice Harry Blackmun. As a pragmatic moderate acceptable to Democrats and Republicans alike, Breyer was easily confirmed by the Senate. He was the author of Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation (1993), an analysis of government environmental and health regulations.