Transcript: Stephen Breyer, Former Supreme Court Justice & Author, Reading the Constitution -

MS. MARCUS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Ruth Marcus, a columnist and associate editor at The Washington Post, and today I’m very pleased to be joined by former Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2022. But Justice Breyer has been busy. He has a new book out today. It’s called “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism Over Textualism.”

Justice Breyer, welcome to Washington Post Live.

JUSTICE BREYER: Thank you very much. Thank you.

MS. MARCUS: It's great to be with you. Sorry we're doing it virtually.

Let's start by talking about why you wrote the book and what you hope it achieves, and just to set the stage for viewers for a minute, textualism broadly refers to how judges interpret statutes, and originalism is kind of its constitutional big cousin. It talks about how to interpret the Constitution.

You mentioned in the opening why this was such an alluring potential method, and then you also said it's wrong. Tell us why it is not the right way to go.

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, the doctrine makes some promises. Why did I write this book? Because a large number of people don't agree with some of the decisions that the Supreme Court has recently made, and probably that's always true. But they're very tempted to say it's just politics, that politics is what guides the judges. And that's not my experience. Or they say, well, the judges like this or they like that. No, that overlooks something.

Politics. Which party is popular? Are you popular? Yes or no? How do I get more popular? That isn't my experience being a judge for 40 years and 28 on the Supreme Court. Rather, the people who try to get someone appointed, say, to the courts, might be very political, but they think that this judge, if appointed, will decide in ways that we like politically. But the judge will think he's doing it because of the law. He will have a way of looking at the law. He will believe that the law requires this result. So the judge is thinking he's doing it, but that's not according to law.

Well, maybe some of the supporters or opponents say politics, and I've tried to explain that in this book, because I think what's really going on and is more important is that there are growing, different ways of interpreting and looking at the law, looking at the example, looking at those words in the statute or the Constitution and saying, "What do they mean?"

And one of the ways, one which I'm not particularly fond of, so promising, it says, "Just read the words." You want to know what the Constitution means? Ask what those words meant in 1788 or 1789 or 1787 to the ordinary, reasonable person. 1870, just after the Civil War, let's just look at those words. You know Scalia in a case--

MS. MARCUS: Justice Breyer, why does that not work from your point of view?

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, it's making two or three big promises. Promise number one, it's simple. Just read. You'll get a single answer, and that answer will be clear and simple. And so the law will be clear and simple throughout the country. That's a promise.

Second promise. If all you do is look at the words or almost only look at the words, you will discover that judges are not able as easily to substitute their personal view of what's good or what's bad for what the law requires.

Now, remember those promises because they're seductive, and what I want to show in here is that those promises are not and cannot be kept. And because they cannot be kept, we should try to follow methods of interpretation that have been followed since Chief Justice John Marshall himself, that have been followed by Holmes and Brandeis and Cardozo and others whom I think are great judges. Learned Hand. You can name them endlessly, but they look not just to words, but they look to purposes. Why did the person write this? Somebody had in mind this. They look to values. What are the values that underlie these words in the Constitution that the Founders wanted us to live by? Now, do you see the difference?

MS. MARCUS: I do see the difference, but I do have a question, which is, why is your way, pragmatism, better, and how does it prevent you as a justice or your colleagues from simply doing what I think all of you agree you shouldn't do, which is substituting your own personal preferences for the outcome?

JUSTICE BREYER: Why? Well, because first, those promises can't be kept, the promises of textualism. One example I'll give you came out, I think, a week or two ago, 63 pages or 65 pages, 30 pages on one side, 30 pages on the other side, and you know what the question was? The question was, what is the meaning of the word "and"? Please, please, that is going to get us nowhere.

And we have a case which says if you or I or someone--and there are people who have children who are handicapped, and Congress passed a law, and that law says that those children who are handicapped are entitled to a good education. And if the Board of Education is not giving them one, the mother can go and sue in a court. And if she wins--and this mother in the case did win--well, she gets her costs. Now, the question legally in the case was, do those costs include the cost of an educational expert, which was expensive, nearly $30,000?

Now, let's look at the word "cost." You know what it says? Cost.

MS. MARCUS: It says cost.

JUSTICE BREYER: Yeah, it says cost. Ah, does that include or doesn't it include? Well, let's look at it twice. And you know what it says a second time?

MS. MARCUS: Still says cost.

JUSTICE BREYER: Still says cost. There we are.

And so I say they're not--there are lots of cases like that. In the Supreme Court, many, many, many. The words do not lead you to the answer. They're very complex, and I could go on a long time, more than an hour, giving you a few cases that are like that. And I say that is not going to get us anywhere. Let's look at a few other things. Oh, look at the words. Of course, if the word is "carrot," that does not mean a fish. I have no doubt about that. But looking at that word there, I'm thinking, hmm, that isn't enough. So I say some human being--and John Marshall said this, and Blackstone said this. Some human being wrote those words. They did go into a law that went through Congress. What did those people have in mind? What was their purpose? What were they trying to achieve? What was the mischief they were trying to stop? Let's look at those things, and let's look at the consequences. Are they going to bring about consequences that will just thwart the very purpose they wanted, or will the purposes be furthered by the consequences? And let's look at the values. You look at that Constitution, this document in general terms, I mean, democracy--

MS. MARCUS: Justice Breyer, this--

JUSTICE BREYER: --rule of law, et cetera.

MS. MARCUS: This is the perfect segue to a question from the audience. B.J. Scales from Pennsylvania wants to know, "Why is the Constitution as a founding guide so difficult to interpret?" You have it in your pocket, but why is it so difficult to interpret?

JUSTICE BREYER: Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. And we're likely to get the cases in the court where they are. It's pretty easy to say that the government of the United States cannot go and say, "Mr. Smith, you cannot give this speech anywhere in Pennsylvania because you are a Democrat or because you are a Republican." That would seem to violate, abridge, in the words of the Constitution, the freedom of speech.

But suppose it isn't a political speech. Suppose what it is is, for example, a signboard saying there's a rally over here, or suppose that it is a signboard which tells you where there's a horse show coming, or suppose it is a rule that tells a medicine company, a pharmaceutical company, that they cannot learn what the brand name of the pharmaceuticals is used by a doctor whom they want to send a selling agent to. Do those things violate the freedom of speech? They're pretty tough.

And suppose somebody calls you a "dirty rat," except he uses words that are even harsher, and you get a little angry. And your friends are there and you hit him in the face. Well, policeman says you shouldn't have used those words. That's too extreme. My goodness. Well, does that violate the freedom of speech?

Or I love this case because it was so interesting, difficult, really difficult. A young woman in high school got really angry at the coach who was teaching her to be a cheerleader, and she goes to her favorite, you know, milkshake shop or whatever she goes to, and she gets out her iPad. And she says to her 120 best friends, Dear 120 Best Friends, that is a terrible school. They won't let me on the first team. They will not let me. I say F"--she uses the F word, and she uses that in respect to the coach, and the school says, you can't do that. She says, "I was in my coffee shop. I wasn't at school. Nobody was hurt. They use those words all the time. You're just naive." And, hey, there's nothing wrong with that, and I have to write an opinion, which I did, which says she's right. She can use those words, but beware, because a school does have--does have more power than an ordinary government institution to watch what the kids say in class and sometimes when they're on school trips. So how do we get across both those messages? School. Let her talk. But school, remember, you are in charge of discipline, and there is such a thing as school discipline. And getting those right words, what I used was a public education is the nursery of democracy.

MS. MARCUS: It's interesting because that was really a classic example of your pragmatic approach, the swearing cheerleader case.

I want to ask a question about the other approach, textualism, because Justice Kagan, your colleague, has described herself as a textualist, but she's also said the current court is textualist only when being so suits it. Do you think that that's a fair critique?

JUSTICE BREYER: She's closer to that now than I am, and that isn't the critique I want to make. What I want to make is a very simple critique, and that is this doesn't work at all. Textualism does not work. You have a case like the cost case. You have a case like the cheerleader case. You have a case like--well, we could go on endlessly.

You know, they in Congress gave to the World Bank something called immunity. So it was very hard to sue them in the United States, and the words were "They will have the same immunity, these international organizations, as a nation," as England, France. And I'll tell you something, when they passed that law in the 1940s, England and France had a pretty broad immunity, but they changed the immunity for England and France, and they made it narrower. Did that change the immunity as well for the World Bank? The International Monetary Fund? Well, that depends on whether "the same as" means "the same as" when they passed the law, 1945, '46, '47, or the same as when you brought the lawsuit, which was last year or two years ago. The same as, when? Then or now? Same as then or same as now? And go ahead, read the words five times. Read the words 20 times. It doesn't tell you, does it? It just doesn't tell you. It's not--it's more than that too.

MS. MARCUS: So I'm just going to press a little bit, and I know you don't want to criticize your colleagues, as Justice Kagan did, for being textualist only when it suits it. And I'm not going to ask you to comment on current cases, but it does seem that the court uses different methods at times when it suits it and doesn't use it when it suits it. I wrote about this a few weeks ago when the case about disqualifying Trump from the presidential ballot came out, and all of a sudden, we weren't talking that much about the words of the 14th Amendment. We were talking about the consequences of throwing him off the ballot, and it was a very pragmatic decision.

So I'm curious about whether you think the originalists and textualists on the court hew to it constantly or whether they pick and choose their methods?

JUSTICE BREYER: I think there are some cases, no one could use it for. I mean, for example, in Article I, it talks about Congress having the legislative power of the United States. Well, ever since the New Deal, agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission, FERC, the Energy Regulatory Agency, the EPA have made rules. Is making rules under a statute which gives those agencies the power to make rules? Is making rules legislation, which is supposed to be just Congress, or isn't it? Well, you can argue for 50 years whether it is or it isn't, but I think the words will not tell you. And when the court comes to cases like that, I'm not surprised that they feel they can't go--no one could go to textualism alone.

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So I don't want to comment on, because I don't know, good faith or bad faith, but it doesn't surprise me one little bit that they come to cases that they just can't use textualism for or originalism.

MS. MARCUS: And you--

JUSTICE BREYER: The gun case.

MS. MARCUS: You have said you said earlier in our conversation that you don't see your colleagues on the court as pursuing political agendas, and I understand that. But when you say they're not pursuing political agendas, they do have a methodology that, as you wrote, does produce--does tend to produce results that are consistent with the views of one political party and, more than that, that are consistent with a conservative philosophy. It produces that result on the right to abortion and overturning Roe. It produces that result on expanding gun rights. One of your last dissents was a magnificent dissent in the Bruen case, going into that. It produces certain results on restricting the ability, as you were saying, of the government to impose regulations.

So when you say it's not politics, you're not saying, are you, that it doesn't have a--produce a certain ideological result?

JUSTICE BREYER: Correct, correct. I think that's a good way to put it, and I don't--I say--I'm pretty careful at saying it doesn't--it's not political in the ordinary way that people think of politics. Who are you going to vote for? Where--what is it? What is it? Because politics in a certain sense, not the ordinary sense, perhaps, but in a certain sense, Paul Freund, great scholar, put it this way. He said no judge, no judge will make a decision based upon the temperature of the day. He means the political temperature of the day. You don't want that. I don't want that. No judge wants that, because that actually is just the judge being moved by public opinion instead of the law or whatever.

But every judge, he says, or most of them anyway, are affected by the climate of the era. And that's why you could have the New Deal court changing pretty seriously, the decisions that had been made by the Taft court or that had been made in the 1900s where the court emphasized tremendously words like "property," concepts like "laissez faire," words like "contract." They're all in the Constitution. Very great emphasis by those early courts, which even went so far as to say that Congress couldn't pass minimum wage laws or maximum hour laws.

Why? Well, if you read the history of that, I personally think the country had become very rich. We were one of the poorest countries in the world before the Civil War, and between the Civil War with the new inventions and new ways of finance, by the time of World War I, we were probably the richest country in the world. And judges may have been thinking in terms of very general approaches. Let us not have the legislature kill the goose that's laying golden eggs, and thus, they would emphasize those points, which, in fact, restricted the ability of the Congress and the legislature to limit laissez faire.

But by the time of the New Deal, nobody--I can't say nobody, but hardly anybody was this great fan of laissez faire and property. Twenty-four percent unemployment, the Great Depression, it wasn't working. We need something new, and therefore, power began to flow to Washington, and therefore, new agencies began to be created. And at that point, the court backed off, and the court was less willing and did not strike down those new laws that were being made and probably so--

MS. MARCUS: And--

JUSTICE BREYER: Yeah.

MS. MARCUS: And, Justice Breyer, one of your concerns that you express about the current court is that its originalism and textualism is not going to--if it adhere to it consistently and doggedly, is not going to--it's going to--not going to provide the flexibility that you need to reflect current circumstances. Justice Thomas encouraged the court to reexamine all of the underlying cases, not just abortion cases, but cases involving same sex marriage, cases involving same sex intimacy, even cases involving the right to contraception. Do you think that--first of all, do you think that that's a serious threat? But more broadly, how concerned are you about the court becoming out of step with the country?

JUSTICE BREYER: It's a concern. It's a concern, but I'll show you, because you bring up, let's say, the gun case. Right now, what does the majority want? I dissented. Justice Kagan dissented. Justice Sotomayor dissented. And what is it that it's asking us to do? It's saying decide whether people have a right to keep a gun by looking at the history of gun regulation at the time of 1789 or maybe before. I say, really? You're asking me to do something I can't do very well. I did try to look some of that up, and it had all kinds of things that were a little bit like guns. They were, well, do you know what a Selbstlader is or a halberd or a skene or even Asian fire, which they threw over the wall of the city and maybe it set people on fire or caused--I don't. I don't. And there aren't many historians who do.

And it's not just that it's pushing to the fore that kind of thinking and deciding a case, but it's also saying I should not look at what is a natural for me to look at. There are 400 million guns in the United States. We are number one in the world. And number two is Yemen, I think. And having 400 million guns is causing quite a problem.

Now, that's a practical problem, and that's part of what is today a purpose, an objective. It fits within what the Constitution is trying to do. It fits within what law is trying to do, which is to allow 320 million Americans of every race, every religion, every point of view imaginable, allow them to live together more peacefully and more productively.

So when I see that method of interpreting an important part of the Constitution, I believe that's what I tried to write here and convince people and show them. That's moving away from the values that the Constitution had there, values that Chief Justice Marshall said we want to have last for a thousand years, maybe, or a very long time. It's moving away rather than in the direction of, and it's that kind of thing that I object to with originalism.

Now, if you want to know, to be fair to arguments that I don't agree with, watch. You know Scalia and I used to argue about these things in public--

MS. MARCUS: Yes.

JUSTICE BREYER: --before schoolchildren, before college students, before law school students who went to Lubbock, Texas. They probably hadn't seen many Supreme Court justices there, and we argued about it. We discussed it, and they would come away with thought number one that we're good friends, which was true. But then I'd want my side to win, you know. So I'd say, you know, things change over time, you know. George Washington didn't know about the Internet, and he'd say I knew that. Yeah, good point.

So I'd say, well, yeah, but he would say the problem with your approach, Breyer, is like the two campers. What are the two campers? The two campers, one sees the other tying up his running shoes. Why are you putting on your running shoes? There's a bear in the camp. You can't outrun a bear. Oh, yeah, but I can outrun you. See what he's thinking?

MS. MARCUS: Yeah.

JUSTICE BREYER: And I say to that, maybe my--he says, you have a system that's so complicated, you're the only one who can do it. And then I say, maybe, maybe not, but I obviously don't think so. But you have a system that if we adopt that, we'll have a Constitution no one wants.

Now, there you have what I think at heart is the argument between these two approaches, and I'll go back and say, yes, it does work. We can, if you're honest, if you're honest, and you must be honest, or what's the point of being a judge? And if you are honest, you will not just substitute what you think is good for the law. You will work seriously at it, taking the different tools that you have. And there are several.

MS. MARCUS: Justice--

JUSTICE BREYER: And putting them together--

MS. MARCUS: --you mentioned your friendship--and it was such a remarkable friendship--with Justice Scalia, and I want to ask about the current court. Justice Thomas said in 2022, when you were still on the court, that the court might have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family. He said you trusted each other, laughed together. You went to lunch together every day. That is not the court of this era.

Now, Justice Sotomayor and Justice Barrett have been on a tour recently, a tour of sorts, promoting the idea that things are not nearly as bad as all that. And I'm wondering what you think those of us on the outside should make of these two very divergent views.

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, I think that Justice Barrett said also it's like being in a family that you can't get a divorce, and when you're there for a while, I mean, what's the choice? Of course, you're going to be friends with people, and you need them. And sitting around that conference table, you understand what Senator Kennedy told me years ago, that if you have a view and you would like others to share that view, don't give a talk to the others, "Ha-ha-ha, I'm so much cleverer than you." Please, that will get you nowhere. And listen to what they say and build on what they say, and sometimes you can make progress. And when you make progress, be sure--and I saw Kennedy do this a lot. The reporter would say, Senator, you did such a good job on that statute. He'd say, don't thank me. Thank Orrin Hatch. He's the one that came up with the idea that we could work with.

And that kind of cooperative arrangement is pretty much what I saw for the 28 years I was there. We didn't agree about everything. No, absolutely not. But we were friends. It was serious. I never heard a voice in that conference room raised in anger or people say insulting things about others. We got on pretty well because I--after all, a very good statement that Lincoln made, I think, in the 1840s, he was speaking to a temperance group, and he said, you know, if you want to get anywhere with your policy ideas, you have to convince others, and you will never convince anybody unless you do not first convince them that you are their friend, not rival. So listen, see what they're thinking. See how you can work with what they have to produce something that advances us from your point of view and their point of view, and remember, it's not the person you're against. You are not against the person. You are perhaps against some of their ideas.

And that's what I tell high school students. I say--they ask me, well, what should we do? And I do talk to high school students. I like that. What should we do? I say, my friends, you're asking me? It's your world. You're the ones who must decide what to do, and I very much hope--and as I think that's the only way that this document here is going to work, I very much hope you will take maybe Senator Kennedy's, maybe Abraham Lincoln's, some of that advice, a you will listen to people. You will talk to them. Find--Mill said that--John Stuart Mill said find somebody who disagrees with you, who you think is an intelligent person, and listen to them, talk to them. Talk, listen, see where you can agree and build on that. Now, that is not a recipe for hostility. That is a recipe on trying to make the country work a little better, a country of 320 million people in every possible point of view.

MS. MARCUS: Justice Breyer--

JUSTICE BREYER: And the court, by the way, I think illustrates that fairly well. Not perfectly, not perfectly.

MS. MARCUS: This morning, the court heard the oral arguments in the mifepristone case, and one of the things that you and the other dissenters warned in Dobbs was that the court was not going to get itself out of the abortion-deciding business, that cases were going to continue to come back to it. Do you think that there's going to be another case, obviously, next month involving emergency room treatments and how abortion rights apply in that situation? Is the court--just having announced that it was out of the abortion business, is it going to be eternally consigned to hearing abortion case after abortion case, or is it going to be a situation where the law of abortion will settle itself out in the next few years and then the desired effect, we don't have to decide abortion cases anymore, will go away? What do you think?

JUSTICE BREYER: You're more likely to have an informed answer to that, going around the country and talking to people, than I am. But I did think that insofar as their motive, they thought in the majority that the abortion decision should not be made by courts. It should be made by the public. And we will not have as many cases, and the cases will be decided at the ballot box. And I thought, Eleina thought, Sonia thought, we thought, oh, really? Oh, really? Is that what's going to happen? And what will happen when a woman's life is at stake in an abortion case? Is the court just going to stay away from that? I doubt it. And what will happen is today's case has to do with a drug that's related to abortion? And there are 50 states and the federal government, and it's quite possible there will be a lot of different laws. And some of those laws will raise the most serious kinds of problems for women and what the law should be, and I would be surprised--I can't go further than that because I say I don't know. But I would be surprised if only a few abortion cases came in the future to the court. I think they've gotten themselves more into the business than they ever were. But that's what I said in the dissent, and so it's always dangerous, as Yogi Berra said, to make a prediction, particularly about the future.

MS. MARCUS: And speaking of surprise, were you surprised by the intensity of the political and electoral reaction to Dobbs?

JUSTICE BREYER: I don't know if I was surprised. Remember, I am old enough to remember days when throughout the South, there were signs that said "Impeach Earl Warren." I'm old enough to have remembered Little Rock, where nine Black schoolchildren tried to get a court order, and they got one saying you can enter Central High School. And the governor with the White Citizens' Council stood in front of that building and said they will not come in, and he went to see President Eisenhower. And he told Eisenhower, he'd let them in Central High School, but he didn't. And he told the press the opposite, and ultimately, after a lot of consultation, Eisenhower sent a thousand troops, 101st Airborne, to Little Rock. And they took those children, those children by the hand, and they walked into that school, so it has a happy ending. No, it doesn't. Because after a while, the school board closed the school, and no one got educated. And they went to the Supreme Court again, and the second time, all nine justices signed the order saying let those Black children in that White school. And Faubus closed the school. There was no school.

But it was too late. Why? Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders. The country had awakened, and this is a story I like to tell and I told to a woman from Ghana, and that woman was the president, the chief justice of their court. And she said she wanted the civil rights in that court more so. She said, why do people do what you say? And I tell the story of Little Rock because I want her to see that people following decisions they don't like--and they didn't like it in much of the South--following those decisions takes a long time. It takes a long time in a country to have the 99 percent who are not lawyers and who are not judges understand that the rule of law depends upon people following not every--but by and large following decisions that they really don't agree with and which may be wrong. And of course, that is the case--

MS. MARCUS: Justice--

JUSTICE BREYER: Yes.

MS. MARCUS: --I wanted to ask you about the leak in Dobbs, which was obviously painful for the court, and Justice Alito has said I personally have a pretty good idea who was responsible and that the leak, quote, "was part of an effort to prevent the draft from becoming the decision of the court"; in other words, that it came from the left.

You told NBC the other day that you have a theory, and I'm curious. Is your theory consistent with Justice Alito's that the leak was motivated by somebody trying to keep Roe in place, or is it different? And then you've said you'd be amazed if it came from a justice, the leak, and I'm wondering if you include spouses in that assessment and if you include law clerks in your assessment.

JUSTICE BREYER: You are into the subject in far more depth than I've been, and the kind of ideas I get on who did what when I think about it is the kind of music that you get when you sing in the bathtub. I mean, I don't know, and when I say I'd be surprised if it would be a judge, being a judge is a privilege, and it's a special job, and it does require honesty. And if you are not prepared to exhibit those qualities and work hard on your opinions, why do it? Why want such a job?

And I was told by a president, I hope, you know, the applause dies very quickly, very quickly. And you're left with the job.

MS. MARCUS: Yep. That's right.

JUSTICE BREYER: And so you better like--and I can't imagine a person liking that job if he's going to muck around and do dishonest things. Why would he like it? There's so many other jobs in the country that he might be qualified to get. So, of course, I don't think it was a judge, and, of course, I don't have a serious--and, you know, I haven't looked into the details. I'm sorry that it was leaked.

MS. MARCUS: Justice, the approval ratings of the court have fallen dramatically from 41 percent in July 2020--I'm sorry. The approval ratings have gone from 41 percent last September down from 58 percent in July 2020. What do you think this is all about, and how concerned are you?

JUSTICE BREYER: Well, some of the things you've mentioned, and of course--of course, I would be concerned for the reason that unless people have confidence in the courts, they will not follow the decisions or they're less likely to. And the following decisions, I heard Senator Reid say this about Bush v. Gore. He said decisions were followed, even though you, Breyer--me--thought it was totally wrong. And so did a lot of other people, maybe half the country or maybe even more than half. But there were no rocks thrown in the street. There were no riots. There were no shots and so forth. And I'm talking to Stanford when I say this and the students and I say, I know 30 percent of you disagree. You're thinking too bad there weren't riots, et cetera. And fine, go turn on the television set, and they won't see you. What they will see is how people decide these things in other countries that don't have a rule of law, and it's pretty bad. So I say think about that before you make up your mind.

And of course, if the court becomes too unpopular, that's undesirable because people will--may--may tend less to follow a rule of law. But think of the opposite. You don't want a judge and I don't want a judge who has a case in front of that judge where the defendant is very unpopular. You don't want that judge following public opinion. You want the judge to do what is the right thing to do under the law in that circumstance, and so you can't just say, oh, dear, the court is unpopular. So is Earl Warren. And all of us now think, of course, Earl Warren was absolutely right, and thank goodness he didn't give in to the popularity of the moment.

So you can't just look at the popularity ratings and decide how you feel about the court. You have to look underneath that to see how they're deciding decisions and not just the immediate result, but what's their theory, what's their approach, and that, I think, is the part that people to my--to my belief are missing. They're not putting enough emphasis on it.

MS. MARCUS: Justice--

JUSTICE BREYER: That's why--

MS. MARCUS: --I think that's a good and important place for us to stop. It was a fascinating conversation. Justice Stephen Breyer, thank you so much for coming to Washington Post Live.

JUSTICE BREYER: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

MS. MARCUS: And thanks to all of you for joining us too. For more of these important conversations, sign up for a Washington Post subscription, and you can get a free trial by going to WashingtonPost.com/live.

Thanks again to Justice Breyer and to all of you for watching.

[End recorded session]

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