This is the Libertarian Podcast.

This is the Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard's the Peter and Gersten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU,

and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

He is also available for any open Supreme Court seats.

And I say that Richard because yesterday

it was reported that Justice Breyer would retire from

the Supreme Court after 27 years of service. I know you're always a fan of

starting with foundations. So can you tell us a little bit about Justice Breyer

and his judicial philosophy and the effect he's had on the court.

Yes, I mean I've known Stephen Breyer for a very long time because again we were fellow members of the

academic community when he was a professor at Harvard.

I would say that I would describe him as kind of a straightforward

centrist New Deal Democrats, Circa 1960.

And I think he's deviated a little bit from that lately,

but not all that much.

What he did as he started out as an academic

was what most professors did in the 60s and 70s, which is a

take an existing set of New Deal institutions in the administrative state and

they think their job is to rationalize its application and to make sure that

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