
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994                   TAG: 9407170031
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TIMOTHY M. PHELPS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BREYER COASTS THROUGH HEARINGS WITH FEW BRUISES

When a bald, scholarly looking Stephen Breyer marched through the hearing room to begin his testimony last week, Republican conservative Orrin Hatch escorted him, the senator's hand on the judge's shoulder.

It was a remarkable spectacle,well-noted on both sides of the political aisle and marking a sea-change from the blood-on-the-wall nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Breyer, only the second nominee of a Democratic president in 27 years, emerged from last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as a jurist who might fit in comfortably with the pragmatic Republican conservatives who control the balance of power on the court.

He gave few clues to his views on controversial subjects such as abortion, using legal artifice to endorse precedents in that and other tricky areas only as "settled law."

He did say that unlike his predecessor, retiring Justice Harry Blackmun, he has no strong views on the death penalty.

And he seemed to endorse the court's revolutionary decision last month favoring an Oregon property owner's rights over local government's attempts to claim part of the property in return for development approval, although he stopped short of advocating further movement in that direction.

Breyer also maintained that even if mom-and-pop businesses have often lost out in his courtroom to big-business monopolies, as antitrust experts have alleged, the consumer ultimately benefited.

Breyer gave a passing nod to a judge's need to put his heart as well as his head into his interpretation of the law, for, he said, "If you don't have a heart, it becomes a sterile set of rules removed from human problems."

But his response to an invitation from Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., to assert that he, like his predecessor, would be the court's spokesman for society's "least fortunate" was less than enthusiastic.

He recalled advice given him Breyer by federal appeals Judge John Minor Wisdom that "If you want to write a purple passage because you feel so strongly, write it and don't use it, because people want your result and are not necessarily interested in your feelings."

by CNB