Justice Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court’s oldest member and one of its three remaining liberals, will retire, giving President Joe Biden his first opportunity to fill a seat on the nation’s highest court.

With Democrats controlling both the White House and a narrow majority in the Senate, this retirement is the party’s first real chance to fill a Supreme Court seat in more than a decade.

A former administrative law professor, Breyer often tempered his liberalism with the kind of technocratic cost-benefit analysis that is common within that field. He was the Court’s staunchest defender of the right of legislative majorities to legislate, believing that judges should be very reluctant to strike down laws under debatable readings of the Constitution — though this broad trust of legislatures did not stop him from rejecting laws that sought to infringe on abortion rights, or from becoming the Court’s most outspoken opponent of the death penalty.

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