Quick--name as many current justices of the U.S. Supreme Court as you can.

OK, this shouldn't be too hard. Everyone knows the girls (O'Connor and Ginsburg), the Chief Justice (Rehnquist), and the black guy (Thomas). Hm. If you're into politics or the law at all, you should also be able to easily come up with the crazy guy (Scalia). Let's see. That's five--there are nine justices. Who else? Staunch Republicans might remember the traitor (Souter). The others get lost in the crowd.

Yesterday morning I learned from a friend that one of the forgotten justices, Justice Breyer (the others are Stevens and Kennedy, in case you really couldn't think of them and are dying to know), was going to speak here at Harvard. So I went to see him. This was my first time seeing a Supreme Court Justice--now I've seen top officials from all branches of government!

My first comment is my great disappointment with Harvard Law School for not publicizing this event. We're in the greatest law school in the country, and one of the current Supreme Court justices comes to our campus, and they don't tell us about it? I heard about this through word of mouth! Granted, he didn't speak at the Law School (he spoke at a general lecture hall in a nearby corner of campus, for a Harvard lecture series unaffiliated with the Law School), but still. There were posters up when Gorbachev came. Breyer is far more relevant to our current studies. You'd think they would tell us about it.

Anyway, when I got there, I was surprised at how great a public speaker he was. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised--he was a popular professor and surely a good lawyer and has had the opportunity to develop these skills. His deep, resonant voice kept changing speed and pitch, and he was informal enough to keep it interesting. I noticed that part of what held my attention was his constant referral to the structure of his talk, and how long he was going to spend on each point.

His topic was basically an outline of his jurisprudential philosophy (a very law-school-related topic). He called himself a Purposivist, as opposed to a Textualist (like Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist). When the law isn't clear, rather than caring so much what the text of the Constitution or a statute says, he looks to the purpose of it. What were the founding fathers or the legislators trying to do? Then he decides the case accordingly.

I don't know if this is just Breyer's personality, or if he has been affected by the independence of his nonpolitical life tenure in his job, but he sure seemed one-sided about his arguments in favor of his philosophy. At least he was open about his one-sidedness, though. Sure, he presented differing positions, and occasionally pointed out objections to his method, but he readily admitted that the examples he picked to demonstrate how his philosophy works were specially picked because they make his way look better.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it made him sound arrogant ("absolutely sure of himself" would be a better characterization), but it wasn't completely convincing, even with the deck stacked in his favor. He said sometimes he has to make up a "Reasonable Legislator" and think what this fictitious character would have been thinking when he wrote a certain statute. Essentially, he almost literally steps into the shoes of the legislator and does his job for him. I'm not so sure I want a non-accountable judge doing that. If we took his position to the extreme, Congress could just pass a law that says, for example, "Bad people should be punished." Justice Breyer can then decide by himself if a particular criminal defendant qualifies as a "bad person" and should therefore be punished.

Anyway, I don't want to argue with Justice Breyer--he's smarter than I am, and I would lose.

I do, however, find it interesting that judges who ascribe to his philosphy are generally appointed by Democratic presidents (except for Souter!), and textualist judges are appointed by Republicans. It doesn't seem on the face of the argument that one method would favor or disfavor any one political philosophy. But there you go.