David Souter Quotes
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The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which 'Plessy' was based had changed.
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The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.
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The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.
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I retired when the Supreme Court rose for the summer recess in 2009, and a couple of weeks later I drove north from Washington with no regrets about the prior 19 years or about the decision to try living a more normal life for whatever time might remain.
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Millions of statements are made about the president every day on every subject and from every standpoint; threats of violence are not an integral feature of any one subject or viewpoint as distinct from others. Differential treatment of threats against the president, then, selects nothing but special risks, not special messages.
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The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.
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I would like to think that enough examples of non-compromise are going to start people thinking that there must be a better way to try to govern the country.
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The restoration comes not only from the landscape and air, though they play their significant part, but from the people. I feel a strong need to be in New Hampshire for as much of the summer as I can manage it.
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The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.
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There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.
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The Brady Act was passed in response to what Congress described as an 'epidemic of gun violence.'
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We hold that an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer's conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.