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Even without writing majority opinions, his contributions were important.

This case note analyses the impact and significance of the European Court of Justice decision of Breyer. It discusses the applicability of EU privacy and data protection law to governmental website use of IP address data.

"An enduring question for democratic government is how much power or administrative discretion should be afforded to unelected bureaucracies. Clayton compares how Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Scalia have addressed the topic of administrative discretion through various administrative law opinions to show how their contrasting methods of legal reasoning and statutory interpretation have enabled and constrained regulatory power. His research identifies themes of Breyer's and Scalia's jurisprudence and reveals the extent to which they defer to agency decisions varies and contradicts both Justices' stated positions on judicial review, legal reasoning, and statutory interpretation to some degree." -- Back cover

Careful to avoid uninformed positioning, I limited myself in my previous contribution to a Science & Technology Studies (STS)-flavoured stance about the need for closer scrutiny of existing or novel technologies when considering the role of law and regulation. Detailed accounts of individual technologies allow better assessments of possible ethical dilemmas created by these technologies. Although authors disagree about the degree of moral agency of artefacts or things, most agree that these are more than simple passive instruments. Things influence us and our perceptions about good and bad. Things act and interact. They mediate and impact on our moral understandings.9 Knowledge about how things do that is not easy. Latour, in particular, criticises every ideal of knowledge and mastery in this area. Technologies simply escape mastery. They are the source of a continuous paradox for humans that praise technology for its functional utility, for its neutrality (neither good or bad) and for it being a means to an end, while these technologies never cease to introduce a history of enfoldings, detours, drifts, openings and translations that abolish ideas like 'function' and 'neutrality'. Latour therefore sheds a critical light on modern humans that have acquired the habit to dominate but fail to see that there are no masters anymore, no clear distinctions between means and end that would allow to identify crazed technologies and 'to bind back the hound of technology to its cage'. Morality and technology interact, often in unpredictable ways, and there is a need to conceive another history, another reassembly of morality and technology. How Latour conceives this reassembly in practice is not clear. A process with openness for predictable and unpredictable outcomes could bring about the necessary dignity of both morality and technology, whereby we renounce the idea of putting the first on the side of means and the second on the side of ends. Latour is no believer in contemporary mantras such as more transparency, or more accountability, assessment and evaluation of options. Wrongly applied, these approaches would lead us again to the impossible ideal of mastery and knowledge of things.