This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 28th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Stephen Breyer will step down as a Supreme Court justice at the end of this term.

Cato's Thomas Berry and Will Yeatman discussed with me some of Breyer's background

in his approaches to administrative law and interpretation of both the Constitution and statute.

Before his time on the US Supreme Court,

what was now Justice Stephen Breyer's background?

He was an administrative law scholar at Harvard.

He wrote a number of influential books and papers.

He worked as the right-hand man on Capitol Hill of the Ted Kennedy committee that led deregulation of the

airlines and that's really where it cut his teeth before he was appointed to

be a judge in the First Circuit, and then ultimately became a Supreme Court justice.

And notably, I would, I think I made reference to this in a conversation we were having offline, which was that Breyer is interviewed

for the Commanding Heights documentary, and he discusses for at least a little bit the competition among airlines in a state of price controls and said,

well you couldn't compete on price, so you began competing on services that you provided. And so he was talking about just

it being an uncomfortable position, being a federal regulator, trying to regulate the deliciousness of meals on airlines in order to prevent this kind of competition.

But you said that he was quick to jump on administrative law cases.

What did his jurisprudence look like in that area?

I think with what you set forth

with the way you introduced the question question you sort of get at it.

He specifically, I mean with respect to airline deregulation, he took on this

thesis of the time that regulation was necessary to prevent quote unquote excessive competition.

...