Antonin Scalia Quotes
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Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.
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'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.
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I respectfully, and indeed diffidently, dissent.
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I am left to defend the 'dead' Constitution.
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Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.
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I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to 'requiree scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary'. But interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
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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.
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To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from? To be sure, you can't favor one denomination over another but can't favor religion over non-religion?
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The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
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People look at rights as if they were muscles - the more you exercise them, the better they get.
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If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.
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I think too many promising young minds are wasted on it.
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How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile.
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If I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government.
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Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-by-case basis.
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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.
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I think that 'the judicial Power of the United States' conferred upon this Court 'and such inferior courts as Congress may establish', must be deemed to be the judicial power as understood by our common-law tradition. That is the power 'to say what the law is', Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803), not the power to change it.
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Today's extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.
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What if I am an aficionado of bullfights and I think, contrary to the animal cruelty people, that they ennoble both beast and man. I would not be able to market videos showing people how exciting a bullfight.
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Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.
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I frankly doubt, moreover, whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity.
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If you care passionately about something has become the only test to determine if something is constitutional. How passionately do you care?
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Laws prohibiting sodomy do not seem to have been enforced against consenting adults acting in private... I do not know what 'acting in private' means; surely consensual sodomy, like heterosexual intercourse, is rarely performed on stage.
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A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.