I wonder if sometimes if the institution mattered more to him than the outcomes, and here

were people who were undoing the institution.

Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and

the rule of law and the law. I'm Daniel Lithwig and I cover those things first late.

I mean, eventually I'll retire. Sure I will and it's hard to know exactly when and you know

there's a famous story. I can't remember who the justices were. You have to look at that up. I think

maybe it was Stephen Field. I don't know where Holmes was sent off to tell him,

well, maybe it's time here, maybe it's time, and then I think Brandeis or somebody went to see

Holmes. I don't have the name quite right, but he said, do you remember Mr. Holmes say when you were

sent off to see Justice Fields, they were great, and to tell him that maybe the time it comes

to reach, yes, he said Holmes, and at dirtier days work I've never done.

That was Associate Justice Stephen Breyer talking to me in December of 2020. A little bit over a

year later, that eventuality has come to pass. Justice Breyer announced his retirement this week.

Following hot on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision to hear major affirmative action cases

and a week of headlines consumed by which Justice was wearing a mask at the Supreme Court and why.

Justice Stephen Breyer, a champion of compromise and civility of bipartisanship and mutual

respect, seems to have timed his departure from the court in the most political fashion possible.

He will be turning the lights out in some sense on a fractured partisan institution. He might no longer

recognize it all. So this week's show, we're asking a former federal judge and leading legal

thinker, Judge Nancy Gertner, to walk us through what Breyer's retirement and the looming nomination

wars mean for the Supreme Court, writ large, writ small, all of it. Later on in the show, we're

going to talk to Slate's own Mark Joseph Stern for more about the Breyer news, his legacy,

...