Justice Stephen Breyer

As Stephen Breyer prepares for retirement, he offers his view of interpreting the Constitution in an interview from The Brian Lehrer Show archives.

Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court Justice and author of Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, offers his view of interpreting the Constitution. 

Partisan politics, brinkmanship, periodic threats to shutdown the government over seemingly routine matters — it is easy to see why so many Americans have grown disillusioned with the political system. "If there's too much cynicism, then the Constitution won't work, it can't," Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer tells The Takeaway. A Clinton appointee who has spent 15 years on the nation's highest court, Breyer warns that a jaded, disfranchised electorate is perilous to a functioning democracy in the U.S. under the Constitution.

Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court Justice and author of Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, offers his view of interpreting the Constitution.

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—Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court Justice and author of Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, on The Brian Lehrer Show