Antonin Scalia Quotes
-
I'm not going to rip all that up. It's water over the dam. The people have gotten used to it. You know, that's what Stare Decisis is all about. In other words, I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.
-
Winning and losing, that's never been my objective. It's my hope that in the fullness of time, the majority of the court will is come to see things as I do.
-
I think it is up to the judge to say what the Constitution provided, even if what it provided is not the best answer, even if you think it should be amended. If that's what it says, that's what it says.
-
Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; 'for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost' is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.
-
The Court's opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.
-
You could fire a grapefruit out of a cannon over the best law schools in the country - and that includes Chicago - and not hit an originalist.
-
If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.
-
Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.
-
I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however, actually constitutional, I would affirm the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals reversing the judgment of conviction.
-
Those who believe that racial preferences can help to 'even the score' display, and reinforce, a manner of thinking about race that was the source of the injustice and that will, if it endures within our society, be the source of more injustice still.
-
'Abusive' (or 'hostile,' which in this context I take to mean the same thing) does not seem to me a very clear standard - and I do not think clarity is at all increased by adding the adverb objectively or by appealing to a reasonable person's notion of what the vague word means.
-
Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.
-
Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois shock the middle classes; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous to equate the denial of taxpayer subsidy with measures 'aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.'
-
Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.
-
This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck's aphorism that 'No man should see how laws or sausages are made.'
-
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
-
Now the Senate is looking for 'moderate' judges, 'mainstream' judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?
-
'The operation was a success, but the patient died.' What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court's opinion in this case is to law.
-
In law school, I never understood antitrust law. I later found out, in reading the writings of those who now do understand it, that I should not have understood it because it did not make any sense then.
-
In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the 'unalienable Rights' with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men . . . are endowed by their Creator.'
-
Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.
-
The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, 'to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,' prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.
-
Judges who find Constitutional rights the Framers never intended take important issues out of the public space of democratic debate and suspend them in a sort of legal formaldehyde.
-
In Barnette, we held that a public school student could not be compelled to recite the Pledge; we did not even hint that she could not be compelled to observe respectful silence. . . . Logically, that ought to be the next target for the Court's bulldozer.