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With conservatives now in full control of the court, replacing Justice Breyer with another liberal would not change its ideological balance or affect its rightward trajectory in cases on abortion, gun rights, religion or affirmative action. But the opening provides Mr. Biden a chance to put his stamp on the court — the last justice nominated by a Democrat was Elena Kagan by President Barack Obama nearly a dozen years ago — and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill said they intended to move quickly to begin the confirmation process once Mr. Biden selects a successor for Justice Breyer. (Liptak, 1/26)

This summer, the Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision on an abortion case in Mississippi that could reshape abortion laws in America. That means Breyer — a reliably liberal vote — will be a part of that decision. But the court is also just beginning the process of thinking about what it will hear next term. And it just announced it’s going to hear a case asking whether universities can use affirmative action to accept new students — another long-held target of conservatives. That case will probably be heard by a Supreme Court with Breyer’s successor. Affirmative action tends to benefit Black and Hispanic applicants, and Biden has promised to nominate a Black woman to the court — an unusually frank promise by a president. The court is also expected to hear in its next term a major case on climate change. (Phillips, 1/26)

In nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer routinely found himself on the losing side of contentious issues but managed to cultivate collegiality as a centrist problem-solver, concerned about the real-world implications of the court’s decisions and protecting its reputation. Often overshadowed by the late liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Breyer will leave a legacy when he retires at the end of the current term as a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, the environment and health-care coverage — and for his questions about the constitutionality of the death penalty. (Marimow, 1/26)

A former administrative law professor, Breyer often tempered his liberalism with the kind of technocratic cost-benefit analysis that is common within that field. He was the Court’s staunchest defender of the right of legislative majorities to legislate, believing that judges should be very reluctant to strike down laws under debatable readings of the Constitution — though this broad trust of legislatures did not stop him from rejecting laws that sought to infringe on abortion rights, or from becoming the Court’s most outspoken opponent of the death penalty. Breyer was also a skilled dealmaker, a talent honed during his extraordinarily successful tenure as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1979 to 1980. (Milhiser, 1/26)

He insisted that politics played no role in the court’s work, devoting a recent book to the subject. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, when he became the court’s senior liberal, he may have hoped to find common ground with his more conservative colleagues. But there was little evidence of that in recent months. In cases on abortion, immigration and the Biden administration’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic, he repeatedly found himself in dissent. (Liptak, 1/26)

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has the air of an absent-minded professor, once joking in court that his wife put directions in his pocket to keep him from getting lost. He concocts outlandish hypothetical questions to try to get answers to difficult questions, often to the frustration of lawyers with limited time to make their arguments. But if Breyer cultivates such an image, it does not mask a razor-sharp intellect, a sunny disposition or a relentlessly pragmatic approach to the law that often finds him searching for a middle ground or grasping for an outcome he can live with on an increasingly conservative court. (Sherman, 1/27)