Judge Stephen Breyer

I am so impressed with the brain of this man. People in the press with little understanding of the issues often praise the intellect of Antonin Scalia. They don't know what they are talking about. Try to catch a speech by Breyer on the internet, and you will see what I mean. I saw him yesterday on C-Span in a presentation alongside Scalia, and the latter was silenced. Breyer is one of the best debaters I have seen. Breyer studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford, and it shows. He deals with an uncharacteristic ease with abstract ideas--not common in the US, not even in the intellectual class. Breyer studied later at Oxford and I am not sure if he studied under Isaiah Berlin. But his major work, Active Liberty, clearly (and the author does not deny that) owes its origin to Berlin's notions of Negative and Positive Liberty. Having said all that: I am not a fan of the views or politics of Breyer. He is too conservative for my taste, especially on issues of business. The man wrote the books on deregulation, literally in his case, especially in the area of airline deregulation.