Here’s something Justice Antonin Scalia can’t even disagree with: today his colleague and frequent verbal sparring partner, Justice Stephen Breyer, turns 73. Happy birthday, Justice!

In life, there are a few certainties. Among them, death and taxes, the Earth orbiting the sun, and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer disagreeing about something.

On the bench, Scalia and Breyer are the Supreme Court’s very own “Odd Couple,” wasting few opportunities to verbally spar on the bench and give new meaning to the term “oral argument.”

Read more about the justices sparring – and listen to audio clips – in Lawyers USA’s special audio feature “At the High Court, it’s still Scalia v. Breyer” (Sub. Req’d)

The U.S. Supreme Court has the power to lay down the law of the land. But such rulings are only as powerful as their enforcement, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out during a speaking engagement last week. And for much of the nation’s history, he said, it wasn’t always clear that Court’s rulings would be carried out.

Speaking at the Calvin Coolidge Center in Plymouth, Vt., last week, Breyer gave the example of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision – which required President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send troops to Arkansas to enforce.

“You can say, ‘well, did it matter what Eisenhower did?’“ Breyer said, Vermont Public Radio reports.  “For me, I’m a judge.  I’m prejudiced.  I’m biased.  I think what he did was fabulous.  That it made a difference to the rule of law in America and it is exactly one of the things that has helped turn around and answer the question, ‘Will they do it?’  The question that has bothered the court through much of its history.”

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will give an address at Harvard Law School today – entirely in French. C’est vrai!

Harvard Law’s dean of students sent this email out to the schools community, according to Above the Law:

Hi –

Sorry to break into your summer but Justice Stephen Breyer will be on campus this Friday, July 22. He will be giving a presentation in French and is inviting any French-speaking HLS students to join him.

The conference will take place from 11:30am to 1:00pm. Please contact me as soon as possible if you will be here and would like to participate. The event is closed so all names must be given to the US Marshals in advance. Thanks!

The justice will be speaking with members of Tunisian civil society and legal community about the U.S. Constitution and its role in our democratic system, according to the Facebook page Co.Nx, which will also carry the event live at 11:30 EDT, for those French-speaking SCOTUS junkies who can’t make it to Cambridge, Mass.

While Justice Clarence Thomas has come under fire for his wife’s Tea Party activities, his colleague came to his defense this week

During an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday, Justice Stephen Breyer was asked a hypothetical about a judge whose wife is involved in issues that may go before the judge’s court. Breyer, according to the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, gave an emphatic defense of Thomas’ situation.

“This is a false issue,” Breyer said. “As far as what your wife does or your husband does, I myself try to stick to a certain principle, and feel very strongly about it, that a wife or a husband is an independent person and they make up their own minds what their career is going to be.”

Some lawmakers and activists have called on Thomas to recuse himself from hearing the constitutional challenge to the health care law, which will land before the Court as soon as next Term. His wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, has been involved with Tea Party-related groups that have openly called the law unconstitutional.

Breyer said spouses don’t influence justices on the bench. “My wife happens to be a clinical psychologist at Dana Farber [Medical Center in Boston], and when I get cases involving psychology, I sit in those cases, OK?” Breyer said.

Breyer also hinted that he believes proposed legislation that would bind Supreme Court justices to the same ethical code as other federal judges is a bad idea.

“The Supreme Court is different in one respect. In every other court,” Breyer said. “If [I’m a circuit judge and]I decided in a close matter to recuse myself, that’s the easy decision. That’s one fewer case I have to decide, and besides, they’ll bring in somebody else to decide it. If I recuse myself on the Supreme Court, there is no one else and that could switch the result.”

Would you like to spend some time in Geneva this summer? What about Lake Tahoe? Or is Rome more your flavor? Well, if you were Justice Antonin Scalia, you wouldn’t have to choose – you’d be heading to all three locales.

After the Supreme Court’s term wraps at the end of the month, Scalia his fellow jurists will be taking to the friendly skies to head to numerous cities within and outside of the United States, the AP reports. Justices are allowed to accept up to about $25,000 in additional income for teaching and speaking engagements, beyond their regular annual salaries of $213,900 (Chief Justice John G. Roberts earns $223,000).

Justice Stephen Breyer will have a particularly busy travel itinerary: a stint in Colorado to participate with Justice Elena Kagan (and possibly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) at the Aspen Institute; an visit to the American Bar Association convention in Toronto;  an appearance at the Calvin Coolidge Center in Vermont; a high school dedication in Fargo, N.D.; and a private appearance to officiate the weeding of former Rep. Patrick Kennedy on Cape Cod.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s travel plans are unknown, as are those of Justice Clarence Thomas – though he and his wife Ginni usually take to the open road in their RV, so keep an eye out and you may see them in the parking lot of your local Wal-Mart.

Justice Stephen Breyer is recovering from injuries he suffered when he took a spill on his bicycle over the weekend near his home in Cambridge, Mass.

The 72-year-old justice suffered a broken collarbone in the accident, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told the Associated Press. Breyer was not at the Court Tuesday when decisions were announced, but is expected to attend speaking engagements this week as scheduled.

This isn’t the first time Breyer was injured in Cambridge on a bike. In 1993, when he was a First Circuit judge being considered by President Bill Clinton for a Supreme Court spot, Breyer was hit by a car while riding his bike in Harvard Square. He suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs, but still traveled to Washington to be interviewed by the president. Clinton picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But it all worked out in the end – Breyer got the nod a year later.

Speaking at a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust, Justice Stephen Breyer stressed the importance of the judicial system in holding perpetrators of horrific atrocities accountable, and in creating a record so that such events can be remembered and not repeated.

“What role can the law play in helping us, through recollection, guard against that day when that perpetual evil, analogous to the plague germ, might re-awaken?” Justice Breyer asked in a keynote address at the Holocaust Memorial Museum Tuesday, an event that wrapped up the National Days of Remembrance.

Breyer used the example of the late Justice Robert Jackson, who served as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of 24 Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity.

“[Jackson] later described his Nuremberg work as ‘the most important experience of my life,’ ‘infinitely more important than my work on the Supreme Court or … anything that I did as Attorney General,’” Breyer said. “His object was to make ‘explicit and unambiguous’ in law ‘that to persecute, oppress, or do violence to individuals or minorities on political, racial or religious grounds … is an international crime … for the commission [of which] … individuals are responsible’ and ‘can, and will be punished.’”

Breyer noted that “Jackson collected the evidence, not simply to convict the war criminals but also to document the facts for history to remember.”

“Nuremberg can remind us that the Holocaust story ended with a fair trial,” Breyer said. “And that trial, along with the other ways in which law furthers the work of remembrance, can remind us of our eternal aspiration for Justice.”

Breyer’s prepared remarks can be found here. More on the address from the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps it’s because DC Dicta is travel-weary, or maybe it’s that the morning was spent wrangling with a temperamental computer (it is Friday the 13^th, we are reminded), but we sure could use some serenity now. But how can legal types like us chillax for a minute in such a hectic, stressful world? According to Justice Stephen Breyer – who apparently is the Supreme Court’s most Zen jurist – meditation is the answer.

“To say that I am a meditator is overstating it,” Breyer told CNN contributor Amanda Enayati. “I don’t know that what I do is meditation, or even whether it has a name. For 10 or 15 minutes twice a day I sit peacefully. I relax and think about nothing or as little as possible. And that is what I’ve done for a couple of years.

“And really I started because it’s good for my health,” Breyer continued. “My wife said this would be good for your blood pressure and she was right. It really works. I read once that the practice of law is like attempting to drink water from a fire hose. And if you are under stress, meditation – or whatever you choose to call it – helps. Very often I find myself in circumstances that may be considered stressful, say in oral arguments where I have to concentrate very hard for extended periods. If I come back at lunchtime, I sit for 15 minutes and perhaps another 15 minutes later. Doing this makes me feel more peaceful, focused and better able to do my work.”

Om, counsel. Om.

Should Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer consider the political climate when making their retirement plans?

While both justices have repeatedly stated that they have no intention of stepping down from the Supreme Court any time soon, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy thinks that the jurists should consider hanging up their robes now.

The reason: with President Barack Obama facing unsure reelection prospects, this summer is the last chance for the president to get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed. And if the president loses his reelection bid, his Republican predecessor will almost surely be the one to replace Ginsburg, 78, and Breyer, 72 – thus shifting the collective ideology of the Court decidedly to the right.

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