The best jurists, as Breyer has described them, chose neither the “willful” nor the “wooden” approach, but rather “an attitude that hesitates to rely upon any single theory or grand view of law, of interpretation, or of the Constitution.” It is a style and an ethos that has been embraced along the way, in differing degrees, by many legendary justices, including Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis in the early 20th century, and Felix Frankfurter and John Marshall Harlan II in the mid-20th century. More recently, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter espoused no overarching method,
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