Justice Clarence Thomas is known for his silence on the bench during oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court. But Justice Stephen Breyer is known for the opposite: his incredible verbosity. He asks lots of questions, and sometimes those questions are quite...extended. He sometimes speaks uninterrupted for three or more minutes, not only posing complicated hypotheticals to the attorneys before him, but also sometimes just thinking out loud.
Law professor Josh Blackman actually tracks Breyer's longest questions. When Breyer speaks long enough to take up more than a page of a case's official oral argument transcript, Blackman adds it to an archive called the "Breyer Pages."
In this episode of Extra Scrutiny, we explore some of the record-setting Breyer Pages and discover the philosophical side of the current Court's most pragmatic member.