Justice Stephen Breyer has been a wonderful influence within the Supreme Court. He will be missed.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, LL.B. ’64, (click here) sometimes says that his job and that of other members of the Supreme Court is to speak for the law. He does not mean that justices are Platonic Guardians, with ironclad power to impose their will on the nation despite being unelected. The job calls for deference to the elected branches of government, he emphasizes, and, even more, for caution and doubt. The United States is built on the principles of liberty, he quotes from a famous speech by Judge Learned Hand, and liberty’s spirit is “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”

At 78 and on the Court since 1994, Breyer is often described as a pragmatist whose vote in a case is influenced by the real-world consequences of deciding for one contending party versus the other. He is less predictable and sometimes more conservative—more of a moderate—than the three other justices with him in the Court’s liberal wing, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Some of their liberal opinions have sparked celebrity for each of them. Breyer has inspired no similar following.

He is best known as a sparring partner of the late Justice Antonin G. Scalia. Beginning in 1991—when Scalia had been on the Supreme Court for just five years and Breyer was the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston—and continuing for more than two decades, they argued in many events around the country about how each thought a judge should speak for the law....

President Biden has been busy appointing judges throughout the USA. There is, however, one judge in North Carolina running for US Senate. He may want to consider her vast experience on the bench.

Cheri Beasley, (click here) the first Black woman to be North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice, launched her 2022 Senate campaign on Tuesday, seeking to break another barrier as the state's first Black senator.

Beasley, 55, has won two statewide judicial elections: for the court of appeals in 2008 and for the Supreme Court in 2014. In 2019, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper appointed her to lead the state's highest court but she lost her 2020 election to serve a full eight-year term by 401 votes.

"For too many families across North Carolina, the doors of opportunity have been closed," said Beasley in a video. "They've been left behind and ignored for too long. I'm running for Senate because it's time for that to change."...

A US Senate bid is no easy walk in the park and she may be well invested in that future, but, if asked she might be a worthy Supreme Court Judge. She has a heritage that dictates as least the consideration for this opening by Justice Breyer. Cheri Beasley would make a magnificent US Senator, but, also an excellant Supreme Court Justice. She is destined for service to this country and it shows.