Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is returning for a short stint on his old home turf — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, based in Boston.
The First Circuit hears federal appeals from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island. The court released a calendar that listed “Breyer” as sitting in on arguments in several cases across two days. A spokesperson for the court confirmed that the name is indeed that of retired Justice Breyer.
“Having sat on the First Circuit for many years, Justice Breyer was invited to return after his retirement from the Supreme Court and he happily agreed,” court spokesperson Susan Goldberg told the Herald on Tuesday.
The late President Jimmy Carter appointed Breyer to the First Circuit in 1980, according to his Harvard Law School biography. After 10 years on the bench, Breyer was elevated to chief judge, where he served until 1994, when President Bill Clinton nominated him for a seat on the Supreme Court. He served as an associate justice on the nation’s highest court until his retirement in 2022. President Joe Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson as Breyer’s replacement.
The San Francisco-born justice, now 86, spent a large portion of his professional career in Boston. A Harvard Law School graduate, he was a member of the faculty from 1967 until his appointment to the First Circuit in 1980 and — upon his retirement after 28 years on the Supreme Court — he returned to the school as Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process.
“I am very pleased to return to Harvard to teach there and to write,” Breyer said at the time. “Among other things, I will likely try to explain why I believe it important that the next generations of those associated with the law engage in work, and take approaches to law, that help the great American constitutional experiment work effectively for the American people.”
Goldberg, the court spokesperson, said Breyer isn’t the first former Supreme Court justice to sit in on First Circuit cases.
Melrose native and longtime New Englander Justice David Souter, who spent his career other than on the Supreme Court as a judge in New Hampshire, has sat with the court since his retirement. So did Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Goldberg said.
Neither Harvard Law School nor Breyer himself responded to Herald requests for comment.
The cases
In all, Breyer will hear arguments in nine cases across 11 different dockets. A major highlight case Breyer will hear arguments for on Jan. 8 is the appeal of Alan Howell Parrot.
Parrot, a Maine native, was sentenced in May to probation for two years and a $5,000 fine for kicking and pushing an FBI agent executing a search warrant on Parrot’s home in Hancock.
But Parrot’s case is quite the story — he’s a professional falconer who says he dealt birds to contacts in the Middle East and while doing so uncovered a wild conspiracy theory.
According to the Daily Beast, Parrot claims that then-VP Joe Biden and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conspired to have Seal Team Six killed. The conspiracy is that Iran had been in on the deal to have Osama Bin Laden killed in 2011 but that the country double-crossed the U.S. and instead switched in a body double. Parrot claims Biden and Clinton then had Seal Team Six’s helicopter shot down so that the truth wouldn’t get out.
“Vice President Biden paid with the blood of Seal Team 6,” Parrot said in a video interview about his theory. “He spent their blood like currency.”
In another case out of Maine, Breyer will hear dueling arguments over a Bar Harbor ordinance limiting cruise ship passengers to 1,000 a day, which business groups say has already hurt the upcoming season. A federal judge largely sided with the town last year, but opponents maintain the decision left the ordinance unenforceable as currently written.
Already the fights over cruise ship limits in Bar Harbor and on the midcoast has made other ports, such as Eastport, attracted to cruise lines. In Eastport, 23 ships are expected to carry nearly 55,000 visitors to the small Down East community this year.
Breyer will also hear an appeal from a former mayor in Haiti, Jean Morose Viliena, who a jury ordered pay $15.5 million over allegations by three men that he participated in a killing, attempted killings and torture of their family members in his home country.
Story by Flint McColgan, Boston Herald. BDN writer Christopher Burns contributed to this report.
