Supreme Court Quotes

Quotes tagged as "supreme-court" Showing 1-30 of 84
Mark R. Levin
“Today, no less than five Supreme Court justices are on record, either through their opinions or speeches (or both), that they will consult foreign law and foreign-court rulings for guidance in certain circumstances. Of course, policymakers are free to consult whatever they want, but not justices. They're limited to the Constitution and the law.”
Mark R. Levin

Robert B. Reich
“A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.”
Robert Reich

Jon   Stewart
“As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death -- all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign countries still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them.”
Jon Stewart, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Robert H. Jackson

“Women who accuse men, particularly powerful men, of harassment are often confronted with the reality of the men’s sense that they are more important than women, as a group.”
Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power

Thomas Jefferson
“You seem to consider the [Supreme Court] judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
Thomas Jefferson

“When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”
Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.”
David E. Wilkins, The Legal Universe: Observations of the Foundations of American Law

“This is how we are being governed right now, people.
Six conservative justices.
They're just doing what they want.

And what they want is retrogression,
maintenance of the status quo--
not even the current status quo,
but that
from a hundred years ago...

Liberty for me, say the privileged white men in charge,
because they can.
And, to keep everyone in their pre-Reconstruction pre-women's-rights place:
Law and order for you.

Liberty for me.
Law and order for you.”
Shellen Lubin

“This is how we are being governed right now, people.
Six conservative justices.
They're just doing what they want.

And what they want is retrogression,
maintenance of the status quo--
not even the current status quo,
but that
from a hundred years ago.

Small government for gun ownership,
what husbands do to their families inside the home,
and rich people's taxes.
Large government for the rights of everyone else
to breathe, to work, to love, to grow,
to read, to pray or not in their own way,
to think.

Liberty for me, say the privileged white men in charge,
because they can.
And, to keep everyone in their pre-Reconstruction pre-women's-rights place:
Law and order for you.

Liberty for me.
Law and order for you.”
Shellen Lubin

Theodore Roosevelt
“The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.”
Theodore Roosevelt

“Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.”
David E. Wilkins, The Legal Universe: Observations of the Foundations of American Law

Bryan Stevenson
“A wide assortment of children's rights advocates, lawyers, and mental health experts were watching closely when we asked the Court to declare life-without-parole sentences imposed on children unconstitutional.

....I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children. I explained that condemning children violates international law, which bans these sentences for children. We showed the Court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that the phenomenon of life sentences imposed on children is largely a result of harsh punishments that were created for career adult criminals and were were never intended for children--which made the imposition of such a sentence on juveniles like Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan unusual. I also told the Court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Bryan Stevenson
“...even though I’m a product of Brown v. Board of Education, about 12 years ago I realized that I don’t think we could win Brown v. Board of Education today.... I don’t think our court would do anything that disruptive on behalf of disfavored people, on behalf of marginalized people. And that terrified me. But it also energized me to recognize that we were going to have to get outside the court and create a different consciousness. The question for me is, why wouldn’t we win? And it’s because we haven’t really reckoned with these larger issues of what it means to be a country dealing with our history of racial inequality.”
Bryan Stevenson

David A. Kaplan
“When the votes of justices in controversial cases can be predicted at the outset, constitutional law simply becomes partisan politics by another name.”
David A. Kaplan, The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court's Assault on the Constitution

“Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.”
Bob Dylan

Kamala Harris
“But for now, I will say this: It would be a mistake to downplay the consequences of having Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. With this lifetime appointment, he will be in a position, along with the conservative majority on the court, to end a woman's right to choose as we know it; to invalidate the Affordable Care Act; to undo the legal basis by which corporations are regulated; to unravel fundamental rights to vote, to marry, and to privacy.

I worry about the ways his partisanship and temperament will infect the court, how it will color his decision making, how it will disadvantage so many who seek relief in the courts. I worry about what it will do to the court itself to have a man credibly accused of sexual assault among its justices. I worry about the message that has been sent yet again to Americans and the world: that in our country, today, someone can rage, lash out, resist accountability, and still ascend to a position of extraordinary power over other people's lives.”
Kamala Harris, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

Stephen G. Breyer
“The Court’s insistence that judges and lawyers rely nearly exclusively on history to interpret the Second Amendment thus raises a host of troubling questions. Consider, for example, the following. Do lower courts have the research resources necessary to conduct exhaustive historical analyses in every Second Amendment case? What historical regulations and decisions qualify as representative analogues to modern laws? How will judges determine which historians have the better view of close historical questions? Will the meaning of the Second Amendment change if or when new historical evidence becomes available? And, most importantly, will the Court’s approach permit judges to reach the outcomes they prefer and then cloak those outcomes in the language of history?”
Stephen G. Breyer, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen

Stephen G. Breyer
“Ironically, the only two “relevan[t]” metrics that the Court does identify are “how and why” a gun control regulation “burden[s the] right to armed self-defense.” In other words, the Court believes that the most relevant metrics of comparison are a regulation’s means (how) and ends (why)—even as it rejects the utility of means-end scrutiny.”
Stephen G. Breyer, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen

Michael Gurnow
“The blame for the overturning of Roe v Wade does not fall upon the overzealous, vindictive evangelical—either in a pew or judge’s robe—anymore than it does the bruised-knee legislator and his Plus-1, the campaign-financing lobbyist: All are boorish cultural phenomena, buoyed by society’s currents, political inertia determining their every direction. Instead, history will shake its head in disappointment at those who stood idly by and did nothing.”
Michael Gurnow

“The Bill of Rights slipped quietly into the Constitution and passed from sight and public consciousness until given a new and very different life by the Supreme Court more than a century later.”
Robert A. Goldwin, From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constutition

“Before August 5, 2019, the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over Jammu and Kashmir, now? And that too is being challenged within the same Supreme Court against the indian parliament decision in August 5. This is clear evidence that the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India on 3 points and Article 370 were both temporary, if 370 was temporary. Of course, the accession was also temporary. Jammu and Kashmir is still a disputed territory within the UN charter.”
Supreme Court India-Article-370

Pete Buttigieg
“It was actually Thomas Jefferson himself who said 'we might as well ask a man to wear the coat that fitted him when he was a boy' as expect future generations to live under what he called 'the regime of their barbarous ancestors.' So even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants — today's judicial so-called conservatives — the importance of keeping with the times. And we deserve judges and justices who understand that.”
Pete Buttigieg

Stephen Vladeck
“But in order after order, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration most of what it wanted without endorsing principles that the justices would be bound to apply to future presidents, so that the justices could (and ultimately did) refuse to provide the same relief when a Democratic president took office. Looking at the cases as a whole, the conclusion is all but inescapable that the Court was just as responsible for enabling the rise of the shadow docket as the Trump administration -- and that it did so in a manner that specifically tended to advance Republican policies rather than conservative legal principles.”
Stephen Vladeck, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic

“I'm thinking about how as a human being
Trump is immune from all the normal inhibiting factors
that cause people to be good, and caring, and careful
(whether because they believe in humanity
or they fear God's wrath).
No self-awareness.
No empathy.
No humility.
No shame.

I'm thinking about how as a society
we can never wholly become immune from diseased minds like his
because if we ever did find a 'perfect' structure,
we would calcify the findings of that moment
and create a new kind of 'originalism'
that could become equally as dangerous
as any other
(the origin story of the United States,
the constitution,
the Bible).

That belief that it was perfect
would itself defeat us.”
Shellen Lubin

“The 'originalism' of which they speak
(they being the Supreme Court, the Federalist Society,
and affiliated lawyers and politicians)
treats the constitution
like Evangelists treat the bible:
they cherry-pick at whim
which tenets they will uphold
and which they will ignore,
and, also, which they will distort
so the text seems to agree with whatever it is
they're claiming.

Of course, it's as absurd to believe there is only deep truth to be found by
trying to get into the mindset of
a privileged white slave-owning land-owning cis male founder of this country
as there is by trying to get into the mindset of
whoever you believe wrote down the various pieces of the bible,
both old and new testaments.

And now they're chopping down the cherry tree
out in the open
with us all watching
(well, watching only when we're not getting felled along with the branches)
and they're speaking the truth about their intentions
in a document called Project 2025.
We all must read it carefully,
read it and weep,
weep and get angry,
get angry and build strength,
and then do all we can to stop them.

It's now, baby,
or never.”
Shellen Lubin

“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
Robert Jackson

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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