David Souter Quotes
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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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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.
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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 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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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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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 day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.
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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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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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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.
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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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There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.