The most recently appointed justice to the Supreme Court bench,
Stephen Breyer was pushed towards high levels of success at
an early age. Born in 1938 in northern California, Breyer
attended a well-known magnet public high school in San Francisco.
He went on to Stanford for his undergraduate studies and won
a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford. Breyer then studied
law at Harvard where he was editor of the law review.
 Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg selected Breyer to
clerk for him during the 1964 term, during which Breyer
helped to draft an important privacy rights opinion. In
succeeding years, he worked for the assistant U.S. attorney
general for antitrust, served as a prosecutor in the Watergate
Special Prosecution Force in 1973 and taught law and government
at Harvard until 1994. In 1974, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy
named Breyer to be special counsel to the Senate Judiciary
Committee; Breyer became the committee's chief counsel five
years later.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Breyer to the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where Breyer
became chief judge in 1990. He also served as a member of
the U.S. Judicial Conference from 1990 to 1994 and the influential
Sentencing Commission from 1985 to 1989, which sets sentencing
guidelines for the country's judges. His work in these various
positions earned him praise for his detailed and thorough
work, particularly on the sentencing framework.
President Clinton nominated Breyer for the Supreme Court
in 1994 when Justice Harry Blackmun retired. He was confirmed
by the Senate by a vote of 87 to 9 and was sworn into office
on Aug. 3, 1994. The newly sworn in Justice Breyer wasted
no time making his mark on the high court by participating
in the questioning of his first oral argument and writing
a dissent against the first opinion the court issued with
him on the bench. While on the Supreme Court, he has tended
to vote in line with the liberal-leaning bloc of Justices
Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens.
Breyer and his wife Joanna have three children.
-- By Maureen Hoch, Online NewsHour
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