From the Bench to the Sketchbook

About Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Stephen Breyer, born in San Francisco in 1938, is a graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He taught law for many years as a professor at Harvard Law School and at the Kennedy School of Government. He has also worked as a Supreme Court law clerk (for Justice Arthur Goldberg), a Justice Department lawyer (antitrust division), an Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor, and Chief Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In 1980 he was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit by President Carter, becoming Chief Judge in 1990. In 1994 he was appointed a Supreme Court Justice by President Clinton. He has written books and articles about administrative law, economic regulation, and, Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, a book about the Constitution. His most recent book is entitled The Court and the World. His wife, Joanna, was born in Great Britain and is a retired clinical psychologist. They have three children (Chloe, Nell, and Michael) and five grandchildren.

About Noëlle Herrenschmidt

Noëlle Herrenschmidt was born in 1940 and started drawing in 1971 for the French group: Bayard Presse. She was introduced to the reportage genre in 1980 in Calcutta with Mother Teresa, then in Hong Kong and Vietnam in 1990. It was there that she opened for the first time her box of watercolors, which will never leave her side. She delved into the judicial world in 1987 with the Barbie trial, then the Touvier trial for the newspaper La Croix. From 1997 onward, as a courtroom sketch artist, she followed famous trials such as the Papon trial, the contaminated blood trial, the Dumas trial, the Clearstream trial…

For the past 30 years, she has also explored enclosed places, jails and hospitals, in order to discover, thanks to drawings and testimonies, the inner workings of these places and how men and women live and work there.

Book after book, she has portrayed an image of our society and its key institutions: justice, health, religion, and, today, politics. From 2010 to 2016, she immersed herself in the political world in order to explain the backstage of the elaboration of law in France.

Find out more about the artist