The news on Wednesday of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement from the Supreme Court at the end of this blockbuster term marks an historical transition point.
One of the great pragmatists in the court’s history, Breyer is the last of President Bill Clinton’s appointees to still be serving. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, now remains from the centrist court that sat together for longer than any other configuration of justices in history.
That court was called the Rehnquist court for its chief justice, William Rehnquist, but it really reflected the judicial temperament shared by Breyer and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It was a body of nine that decided almost all major cases by finding five votes for a pragmatic consensus that lay somewhere between the aggressive liberalism of 1950s and 1960s and the incipient right-wing ascendance that is in evidence today.
