Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is joining the faculty at the Harvard Law School, ... [+]
Harvard University has announced the appointment of retired Justice Stephen Breyer to the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process at Harvard Law School. According to the announcement, the appointment is effective immediately.
Justice Breyer has written extensively on a number of legal topics, including administrative and regulatory policy, comparative constitutional law, and statutory and constitutional interpretation.
The appointment represents a return for Breyer to Harvard where he was both a student and a law school faculty member previously. He earned his A.B. magna cum laude in philosophy from Stanford University, and as a Marshall Scholar, he received a B.A. from Magdalen College at Oxford University with first class honors.
Breyer graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. Breyer served on the Harvard Law School faculty from 1967 to 1980 and held a joint appointment at the Kennedy School of Government from 1977 to 1980.
The Byrne chair, which Breyer will now hold alongside Professor Todd Rakoff ’75, was previously held by Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1924 until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1939.
“Justice Breyer is a historic jurist and a world-class legal scholar who also has a distinguished history as a member of this faculty,” said John F. Manning ’85, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law. “I am thrilled to welcome him home to Harvard Law School. His brilliance, experience, collegiality, openness, and intellectual inquisitiveness will deeply enrich our community and advance our mission of teaching, scholarship, and service.”
According to Harvard, Justice Breyer will teach seminars and reading groups, continue to write books and produce scholarship, and participate in the intellectual life of the school and in the broader Harvard community.
As part of the announcement, Justice Breyer included the following statement: “I am very pleased to return to Harvard to teach there and to write. Among other things, I will likely try to explain why I believe it important that the next generations of those associated with the law engage in work, and take approaches to law, that help the great American constitutional experiment work effectively for the American people.”
In 1980, President Carter appointed Breyer to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where he served from 1980 to 1994. He was chief judge from 1990 to 1994. In 1994, President Clinton nominated Judge Breyer as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a position he assumed on August 3, 1994. He retired from the bench this June, and on his last day in office swore in his former law clerk — Ketanji Brown Jackson — to take his place on the bench, becoming the nation's first Black female justice.
