Stephen Breyer worries about Supreme Court's public standing in current political era

Justice Stephen Breyer, who may be nearing the end of his Supreme Court tenure, expressed concern on Tuesday about the standing of the high court and the possible erosion of public confidence in its decisions.

In an expansive, two-hour lecture at Harvard Law School, Breyer bemoaned the common practice -- by journalists, senators and others -- of referring to justices by the presidents who appointed them and of describing the nine by their conservative or liberal approach to the law. "These are more than straws in the wind," the 82-year-old Breyer said. "They reinforce the thought, likely already present in the reader's mind, that Supreme Court justices are primarily political officials or 'junior league' politicians themselves rather than jurists. The justices tend to believe that differences among judges mostly reflect not politics but jurisprudential differences. That is not what the public thinks."