Breyer was born in San Francisco, California. He married Joanna Hare in 1967, and has three children Chloe, Nell, and Michael. He received an A.B. from Stanford University, a B.A. from Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1964 Term, as a Special Assistant to the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Antitrust, 1965-1967, as an Assistant Special Prosecutor of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, 1973, as Special Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 1974-1975, and as Chief Counsel of the committee, 1979-1980. He was an Assistant Professor, Professor of Law, and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, 1967-1994, a Professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 1977-1980, and a Visiting Professor at the College of Law, Sydney, Australia and at the University of Rome. From 1980-1990, he served as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and as its Chief Judge, 1990-1994. He also served as a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, 1990-1994, and of the United States Sentencing Commission, 1985-1989. President Clinton nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat August 3, 1994.
Considered as a liberal judge, along with David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and often finds common causes with moderates Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Breyer, along with John Paul Stevens, voiced a dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on Eldred v. Ashcroft, where the Court ruled that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was not unconstitutional.