Justice Breyer announces his intention to step down from active service after four decades,

four decades on the federal branch of 28 years on the United States Supreme Court.

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 Dahlia Lithwick and I cover those things for Slate.

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 that up. I think it was

maybe it was Stephen Field. I don't know. Or 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, say, or Gray, maybe to tell him that maybe the time it'd come to retire?

Yes, said Holmes. And a dirtier day's 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,

...