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Breyer Is Praised, Assailed as His Senate Hearing Ends

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Associated Press

Supreme Court nominee Stephen G. Breyer was praised by the American Bar Assn. but called an insensitive extremist by consumer activist Ralph Nader as his confirmation hearing ended Friday.

Twenty-one witnesses testified for or against Breyer’s nomination during a day in which most of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 18 members spent little time in the hearing room.

A committee vote to approve Breyer seemed certain after he completed three days of testimony Thursday, and nothing transpired Friday to alter that assessment.

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“He’s in good shape,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).

Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said the committee will vote on the nomination as early as Tuesday and no later than Thursday. If the committee vote is Tuesday, Biden said, the full Senate could vote on Breyer by late next week.

The ABA gave Breyer its highest rating of “well qualified.”

Washington lawyer Robert Watkins said the association’s 15-member committee on the federal judiciary unanimously accorded to Breyer the rating “reserved for the top of the legal profession.”

Breyer, for the last 14 years a federal appellate judge in Boston, was referred to by Stanford University law professor Kathleen Sullivan as “a man of great even-handedness as well as open-mindedness.”

Nader disagreed, calling the judge “extraordinarily one-sided” in favor of big business in cases involving competition and health-and-safety regulation.

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