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" "[S]omething I enjoy is talking to [all kinds of students]. And they'll . . . ask me . . . "What is it you find particularly meaningful about your job?" . . . [W]hat I say to them is: Look, I sit there on the bench, and after we hear lots of cases [it becomes apparent that this] is a complicated country; there are more than 330 million people. And my mother used to say, "It's every race. It's every religion." And she would emphasize this: "And it's every point of view possible." . . . [I]t's a kind of miracle when you sit there and see all of those people in front of you - people that are so different in what they think. And yet, they've decided to help solve their major differences under law. And when the students [I speak to] get too cynical, I say, "Go look at what happens in countries that don't do that."
Stephen Breyer (born August 15, 1938) is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1994 to 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and replaced retiring justice Harry Blackmun. Upon retirement, he was replaced by one of his former clerks, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Breyer was associated with the liberal wing of the Court.
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In this country, amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent. They may be changed, but they speak the same language in war as in peace. It has always been one of the pillars of freedom, one of the principles of liberty for which…we are now fighting, that the judges…stand between the subject and any attempted encroachments on his liberty by the executive, alert to see that any coercive action is prohibited in law.100