Bonus 26: Justice Breyer, Architecture Critic

The third installment in my tour of favorite opinions by former Justices features Justice Breyer's "statement" respecting the Court's 2010 decision to permanently close its front doors

Welcome back to the weekly bonus content for “One First.” Although Monday’s regular newsletter will remain free for as long as I’m able to do this, much of Thursday’s content is behind a paywall to help incentivize those who are willing and able to support the work that goes into putting this newsletter together every week. I’m grateful to those of you who are already paid subscribers, and hope that those of you who aren’t yet will consider a paid subscription if your circumstances permit:

One of the central distinctions between the substance of Monday’s free issues and that of Thursday’s bonus content is the personalization of the latter. To that end, today features the third in a subset of bonus content posts, in which I will, from time to time, write up my favorite opinion from a former Justice (I won’t get to all of them, with sincere apologies to the Justice Todd fans among you.)

This week, my subject is Justice Stephen Breyer, the most recent Justice to retire from the Court. Breyer served for just under 28 years, including the second-longest tenure as the Court’s junior Justice—from his August 1994 confirmation to Justice Alito’s confirmation in January 2006. (For a really obscure SCOTUS trivia question, can you guess which Justice is the only person to spend more time in that capacity?)¹

Across nearly three decades, Justice Breyer wrote a lot of opinions, including his fair share of major opinions for the Court and significant dissents. But my personal favorite technically isn’t an opinion at all; it’s Breyer’s two-page “memorandum,” published in the Supreme Court Journal for May 3, 2010—which is effectively a dissent from the Court’s non-judicial decision, announced that day through a press release, to permanently close its 17-feet-high, 13-ton bronze front doors, pictured here:

The statement (which Justice Ginsburg joined) is self-explanatory, so I’m just going to paste it below the paywall with my favorite passages in bold (and then reflect on it a bit at the end):