Justice Stephen Breyer with Neal Katyal

To mark the paperback release of the New York Times bestseller, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism, former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Stephen Breyer offers a provocative analysis of the textualist philosophy of the current Supreme Court’s supermajority and makes the case for a more pragmatic approach of the Constitution. 

Textualists claim that the right way to interpret the Constitution and statutes is to read the text carefully and examine the language as it was understood at the time the documents were written. This is not Justice Breyer’s philosophy nor has it been the traditional way to interpret the Constitution since the time of Chief Justice John Marshall, who said that the Constitution must be a workable set of principles to be interpreted by subsequent generations.

Most important in interpreting law, says Justice Breyer, is to understand the statutes as well as the consequences of deciding a case one way or another. He illustrates these principles by examining some of the most important cases in our country’s history, among them the Dobbs and Bruen decisions from 2022 that he argues were wrongly decided and have led to harmful results. 

Justice Breyer will be in conversation with Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the U.S. He is currently the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown Law and is a partner at Milbank LLP. He has argued 52 cases before the Supreme Court of the U.S.