Poor Justice Stephen G. Breyer just can’t catch a break.

In the last year alone, Breyer suffered a broken collarbone in a bicycle accident, and he was robbed at machete point in his Carribean vacation home. Now comes news that Breyer’s Georgetown home was burglarized earlier this month.

The Washington Post reports that the robbers made off with silver valued at over $3,000. But fear not, a spokesperson for the Supreme Court said no Supreme Court-related documents were swiped.

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He’s made cracks about bad dictionaries, deadpanned about deporting babies to China, and quipped that a justice’s job could at times violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

By making the audience and other justices of the Supreme Court laugh during oral arguments more than five dozen times, Justice Antonin G. Scalia sailed to an easy victory as this term’s Funniest Justice. Since DC Dicta began keeping count, Scalia is undefeated.

So the real race was for second place. And though Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. made a real contest of it, it was Justice Stephen G. Breyer who walked away with the silver this term, with Roberts coming in third.

According to the laugh count, as noted in the Court’s official transcripts, every justice earned at least one laugh this term except Justice Clarence Thomas, who hasn’t made a comment during oral arguments – humorous or otherwise – since Feb. 22, 2006. Let’s just hope that when he does speak, we’ll get a chuckle out of it.

Here is the final tally:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 63

Justice Stephen Breyer: 47

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 26

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 11

Justice Elena Kagan: 7

Justice Samuel Alito: 5

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 2

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Clarence Thomas: 0

“I don’t want to repeat the question for the third time,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said during an exchange with attorney Carter G. Phillips during yesterday’s oral arguments in the case Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter.

“I wish you would,” said Justice Antonin G. Scalia to Breyer. “I’ve lost the question.”

As the audience laughed, Breyer retorted: “Well, here sometimes not everyone pays sufficient attention to these very clear questions.” More laughs.

The familiar Scalia & Breyer comedy act was in full effect at the court this week, but it was Breyer who was the week’s funniest justice, drawing five laughs during oral arguments in three cases. Scalia, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and Justice Elena Kagan each scored two laughs.

Here’s the tally with only one week of oral arguments remaining in the term:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 61

Justice Stephen Breyer: 46

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 25

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 11

Justice Elena Kagan: 7

Justice Samuel Alito: 5

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 2

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Clarence Thomas: 0

“Policemen frequently don’t arrest people for everything they might arrest them for,” Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out Wednesday during oral arguments in the case Reichle v. Howards. “I mean jaywalking, to take an example. There are all kinds of things where they just normally don’t arrest somebody. … I might sometimes have driven 60 miles an hour in a 55-mile zone. And I shouldn’t even admit this. I hope I get away with it.”

That comment earned Breyer one of the six laughs he received this week from the courtroom audience, making him the week’s Funniest Justice, and helping him chip away at fellow funnyman Justice Antonin Scalia’s lead for the term. With just three weeks of oral arguments left, can Breyer pull off an upset and best the three-time Funniest Justice champ?

Here are the standings for the term so far:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 44

Justice Stephen Breyer: 38

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 24

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 6

Justice Samuel Alito: 5

Justice Elena Kagan: 2

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 1

Justice Clarence Thomas: 0

A week after Chief Justice John G. Roberts defended Supreme Court justices’ process for deciding whether or not to recuse themselves from cases that pose a potential ethical conflict, Justice Stephen Breyer also weighed in on the debate in defense of the Court’s practice.

“There’s a code of ethics. It’s 24 volumes. It’s in my office. It’s up in the library. Before I have any case that involves ethics I go read it and see what’s there,” Breyer said Saturday at a Washington legal conference, according to the Associated Press.

As the challenge to the federal health care law is set to be heard by  the Court in March, some critics have called on Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan to recuse themselves from considering the case, and urged ethics rules to be revised binding the Supreme Court to the same recusal standards that other federal judges must follow.

Roberts, in his annual report on the judiciary, argued that the Court’s justices do consult the Judicial Code as well as other standards in deciding whether or not to recuse.

Breyer echoed Roberts’ sentiments.

“We are bound. We’re acting as if we’re bound,” Breyer said.

Also like Roberts, Breyer noted a key difference between Supreme Court justices and other federal judges: when lower court judges recuse, they are replaced. When a Supreme Court justice sits out a case, there is no replacement, and the decision can make a difference in the outcome of a case.

“That means I have to take with absolute seriousness the obligation to sit as well as the obligation not to sit,” Breyer said.

“Look, anything can be transformed into a process,” Justice Stephen Breyer told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Wednesday during oral arguments in the patent case Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, “Look at those real estate ones, lawyers ones. I have a way of making a great argument in the Supreme Court. You know, you could patent some of your arguments.”

This was one of four funny comments from Breyer during this week of oral arguments, making him this week’s top laugh earner. Justice Antonin Scalia got three chuckles, while Justice Anthony Kennedy earned two laughs.

Here are the standings after six weeks:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 21

Justice Stephen Breyer: 16

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 9

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 3

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Elena Kagan: 1

Justice Clarence Thomas: 0

Justice Samuel Alito: 0

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 0

During oral arguments Tuesday in the case National Meat Association v. Harris, the Justice Stephen Breyer asked if the Court had to “write an 11-part opinion” dissecting each individual provision of a state statute to determine if it was preempted by a federal meat inspection law.

“I’m not trying to get out of work,” Breyer said, drawing laughter from the audience. “I just want to know.”

Without missing a beat, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in.

“I’d like to get out of the work, to tell you the truth,” Scalia said as the crowd laughed again.

This week, Scalia broke open a wide lead in this terms funniest justice contest, earning a whopping eight laughs during oral arguments. Breyer earned three, while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg each made the crowd chuckle once.

Here are the standings so far:

Justice Antonin Scalia: 15

Justice Stephen Breyer: 10

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: 7

Justice Elena Kagan: 1

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1

Justice Anthony Kennedy: 0

Justice Clarence Thomas (silence continues): 0

Justice Samuel Alito: 0

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: 0

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has twice battled cancer and has since been the subject of speculative whispers regarding whether and when she would step down from the Supreme Court bench, told USA Today that she feels fine and isn’t going anywhere.

Ginsburg said she received a clean bill of health after her most recent annual checkup. Ginsburg, 78, has shot down retirement rumors before, saying that she’d like to stay on the bench until she is at least 82 – the age at which Justice Louis Brandeis retired from the Court in 1939.

But as the next presidential election looms just one year away, speculation over Ginsburg’s future on the Court and the implication of a possible vacancy next term have some left leaning political commentators  openly urging Ginsburg to step down now. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote that Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer should consider hanging up their robes so that President Barack Obama gets two more Supreme Court appointments before his first term ends.

“If Obama loses, they will have contributed to a disaster,” Kennedy wrote in a piece on The New Republic‘s website.

After oral arguments concluded at the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer had another appearance to make – before Congress.

The justices traveled across the street from the Supreme Court building to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, where Scalia lamented the declining in quality of federal judges. That decline, he said, was caused by Congress’ overzealous criminal lawmaking, which created the need for so many more judges.

“Federal judges ain’t what they used to be,” Scalia told the committee, according to Mark Sherman of the Associated Press. The federal judiciary is “not as elite as it used to be.”

The justices, never afraid to publicly disagree, expressed their different views of constitutional interpretation.

“I’m hoping that the ‘living Constitution’ will die,” Scalia said at one point, according to the Huffington Post’s Mick Sacks. Breyer responded by repeating a nearly 200-year-old quote by Chief Justice John Marshall: “It is a constitution we are expounding” because it is “to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”"

She may not pull in a lot of laughs during oral arguments, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is laughing all the way to the bank as the Court’s wealthiest Supreme Court justice by a long shot, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

With a net worth somewhere between $10.7 million and a whopping $45.5 million, Ginsburg easily tops the list of wealthiest justices, according to the center, which crunched the justices’ financial disclosure data from 2009 (the report based on the latest 2010 filings will be unveiled in the fall). Ginsburg’s holdings include a $6 million retirement nest egg.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s second-place finish is attributable mainly to an array of investments (some of which spur him to recuse himself in cases involving the companies he invests in). His wealth is estimated to be between $4.6 million and $16.2 million.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan are also millionaires, according to the analysis, though none come close to Ginsburg or even Breyer.

And while Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas can each claim a net worth well in the six-digit range, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cannot. In fact, she could be the only justice in the red. Her net worth is somewhere between $95,000 in debt to $50,000, according to the report.