Dahlia Lithwick Quotes
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For the most part, much of the legal world's attention has been focused on Donald Trump and his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who is currently presiding over the Trump University fraud cases in California. Trump somehow managed to offend surprising numbers of establishment Republicans.
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We don't care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing.
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Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.
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I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more.
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The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.
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Thurgood Marshall was uniquely able to understand and comprehend what it meant to grow up in the Jim Crow south.
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Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.
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On the one hand we want to preserve the integrity of the judicial branch, and we want to talk about judicial independence, and how damaging and dangerous it is when Donald Trump calls out Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel. And at the same time, at the end of the day, judges work for us and we can recall them and we can impeach them.
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There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.
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If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isiolated.
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In [Philip] Howard's view, our reliance on law, lawyers, and lawsuits has turned Americans into fat, neurotic cowards who 'go through the day looking over their shoulder instead of where they want to go.'
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I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.
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A lot of conservative writers have twisted that argument in the conversation around Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel and said this is identity politics as played by liberals. And that I think what they're trying to say is that progressives are the first to say.
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One of the things that drives me batty is people who think they're court watchers, who say, "Oh, Clarence Thomas. You know, his clerks do all the work for him. You know, he doesn't deserve to be there, and has never done anything."
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Donald Verrilli has argued 37 cases in five years on behalf of the [Barak] Obama administration. Many of them turned out to be truly landmark cases. He is the seventh-longest-serving solicitor general in American history.
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Even Merrick Garland can't get up and give a press conference in which he says, "Give me a damn vote." We just hear silence.
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On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.
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Never believe in any faith younger than you are.
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The criticism from the other side of [race] debate - and these are not necessarily I think defenders of [Donald] Trump, but they're certainly quick to say, you know, if you're going to live by the race card, you die by the race card.
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There's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.
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The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.
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What's doubly, possibly triply weird about the [Donald] Trump claim is that I said something really hateful and offended an entire class of people, and in a case that actually has nothing to do with race he should still be conflicted out.
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Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel has not said anything, and in fact, cannot say anything. But I would even broaden it out to, you know, judges who are victims of attack ads in say state Supreme Court elections can't talk back. Judges are really barred from commenting on this kind of huge public hue and cry.
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I wonder if there's just a sense that we have nothing to learn from any Supreme Court justice, including the great Chief Justice John Marshall.