UofSC’s December commencement to feature U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
Posted on: November 20, 2017; Updated on: November 20, 2017
By Jeff Stensland, stenslan@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3686
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer will be the guest speaker at the University of South Carolina’s commencement exercises Dec. 18.
The 2:30 p.m. ceremony for bachelor’s, master’s and professional degree recipients from all eight campuses will be in the Colonial Life Arena. Breyer will receive the honorary degree of doctor of public service. Carolina alumnus and National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt III will receive an honorary doctor of science degree.
The doctoral hooding ceremony will be at 9:30 a.m. in the Koger Center for the Arts. Chemical engineering professor John Monnier, a recent inductee into the National Academy of Engineering, will address graduates.
The university expects to award approximately 2,018 degrees from the Columbia campus. System campus December graduates include approximately 245 from USC Aiken, 67 from USC Beaufort, 38 from USC Lancaster, 43 from USC Salkehatchie, 20 from USC Sumter, eight from USC Union and 461 from USC Upstate.
Born in San Francisco, Breyer received bachelor’s degrees from Stanford University and Magdalen College, Oxford, and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States, as a special assistant to the assistant U.S. attorney general for antitrust, as an assistant special prosecutor of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, as special counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as chief counsel of the committee.
Breyer was a law professor at Harvard Law School from 1967 to 1994 and served as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1990 to 1994. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton and was sworn in in August 1994. He authored the 2010 book “Making Our Democracy Work.”
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