David Souter Quotes
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Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.
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While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.
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When Congress exercises the powers delegated to it by the Constitution, it may impose affirmative obligations on executive and judicial officers of state and local governments as well as ordinary citizens.
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The Court's majority holds that the Establishment Clause is no bar to Ohio's payment of tuition at private religious elementary and middle schools under a scheme that systematically provides tax money to support the schools' religious missions.
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What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible.
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It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.
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Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.
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The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.
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If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.
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Congress has the power to legislate with regard to activity that, in the aggregate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
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Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.
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In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.
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History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.
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There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.
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The obligation of any judge is to decide the case before the court, and the nature of the issue presented will largely determine the appropriate scope of the principle on which its decision should rest.
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Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had the power to issue commands to the several sovereign states, but it had no authority to govern individuals directly.
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Over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States.
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We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.
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Every defendant knows, if endowed with the mental competence for criminal responsibility, that the life he will take by his homicidal behavior is that of a unique person, like himself, and that the person to be killed probably has close associates, 'survivors,' who will suffer harms and deprivations from the victim's death.
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I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great that when the term of court starts, I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.
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I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.
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The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.
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Murder has foreseeable consequences. When it happens, it is always to distinct individuals, and after it happens, other victims are left behind.
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For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, 'Brown' must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.