On semantics and snails: Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer visits Brown

During his time on the Supreme Court, Breyer said that there was an unwritten rule that was critical to helping justices make progress while deliberating difficult and complex matters of law.

"Nobody speaks twice until everybody has spoken once," Breyer said. "It's a very good rule for any small group. You have to listen to what other people are saying and see if you can work with that."

That rule, he said, helped the justices to stay civil even in the face of sometimes fierce differences of opinion. Breyer, for example, remained good friends with fellow justice Antonin Scalia, even though the two had fundamentally different approaches to the law, he said.

Scalia was famously a constitutional originalist. As Breyer described it, Scalia interpreted the law based on how "ordinary people who were part of the political process at the time the law was written" would have understood the law's wording. But words, Breyer pointed out, can have complex meaning. They can be abstract and imprecise.

"I say language isn't the whole story," Breyer said. "Purposes help. Values help. Consequences help."

What's more, Breyer said, resting one's interpretation of the law on people who were engaged in the political system at the founding of the republic can be problematic. For example, when thinking about the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned abortion protection in the United States, Breyer, who dissented in that decision, pointed out there was a key group missing from the political system at the time the 14^th Amendment was written in the 1860s.

"One of the groups that was missing starts with a 'W' and ends with an 'N' and has five letters," he said, referring to women. "Do they count?"

Breyer and Driver concluded their conversation with a discussion about the rule of law. Breyer discussed Albert Camus' novel, "The Plague," which Breyer interprets as an allegory for the rise of Nazism in Germany.

"The plague germ never dies," Breyer said. "It goes into remission. It lurks in the attic. It lurks in the hallways. It lurks in the file cabinets. And one day…it will reemerge. The rule of law is one of the weapons…humans have created in order to keep that rat in its home, so that it cannot re-emerge."