Justice Breyer Demonstrates Bilingual Ability in Interview with French News Agency
Image from Shutterstock.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer dished about constitutional law in an interview with a French news agency given partly in French.
Breyer is “a fluent French-speaker with a ready and courteous smile,” Agence France-Presse reports. During an interview, he switched from English to French as he talked about some of his favorite themes, including the need to apply a Constitution written more than 200 years ago to modern legal issues.
Breyer told the interviewer that lifetime tenure insulates the justices from politics. “I try to decide the cases the best I can,” Breyer said. “That’s what judges do. And then journalists, or law professors, or others can say whether they consider that liberal, or conservative, or whatever they want to say.”
Breyer also talked about his goal when writing a dissent. “I’m always writing a dissent not for you, and not for the public,” he told AFP. “My audience is always the other judges. And they will read it. And I’m hoping that there’ll be some changes. And sometimes there are, you see—more than you think. And then the dissent has succeeded.”
