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Scotus Quotes

Browse 11 quotes about Scotus.

Scotus Quotes

“The sovereignty of "We the People of the United States" is admittedly an abstraction—an idea. But abstractions often have legal consequences. And the single idea of popular sovereignty generates a powerful set of legal implications covering a vast range of constitutional issues from limited government and judicial review to federalism and separation of powers to nullification and constitutional amendment. In one vital area of contemporary jurisprudence, however, the Supreme Court has fashioned doctrine wholly antithetical to the Constitution's organizing principle of popular sovereignty. By allowing both federal and state governments to invoke "sovereign immunity" from liability for constitutional violations, the Court has misinterpreted the Federalist Constitution's text, warped its unifying structure, and betrayed the intellectual history of the American Revolution that gave it birth. In effect, the Court has transformed "sovereignty" into the very tool of government supremacy that our Revolutionary forebears wielded pen and sword to destroy.”

Us ConstitutionFederalism1987ScotusSovereign ImmunityState Sovereignty
Book:Of Sovereignty and Federalism
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“The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas. … There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.”

Affirmative Action2007Scotus1991Clarence Thomas
Book:The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
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“Few men or women in our lifetimes have been so unjustly vilified in the popular media as the late Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court. If you are not a lawyer who read his opinions, if you know nothing about Justice Scalia other than what you have read in the popular press, you have surely been deceived into believing that this man was some sort of archconservative who could regularly be counted upon to side with the government and trample the constitutional liberties of the poor and the powerless. The truth is much more complicated than that. While Justice Scalia was, by his own admission, exceptionally stingy in refusing to accept arguments about constitutional rights that involved some aspect of general "liberty" that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—rights like abortion, or same-sex marriage—when it came to the defense of constitutional liberties that are explicitly described in the Constitution, no other recent member of the Supreme Court was so uncompromisingly passionate and liberal in refusing to water down those protections.”

Supreme CourtConstitutional Rights2016ScotusAntonin Scalia
Book:You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
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“Well, let's see. There's—of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others. But, um.”

LawPoliticsHistoryUnited StatesStupidityRoe V WadeScotusEquivocationKatie CouricPalinisms
Author:Sarah Palin
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“If only the court had acted more slowly,’ RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had ‘halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue. (85).”

ScotusRagRuth Bader Ginsberg
Book:Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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“To restrict or legalize abortion, to allow or forbid gay marriage, a legislator would need to write and pass a law, get it signed by the president or a governor, and perhaps override a veto. A Supreme Court justice need only persuade four other people. If he or she is not internally constrained by the authority of a text, he or she is not constrained.”

PoliticsUnited StatesAbortionPolitics Of The United StatesSame Sex MarriageScotusUnited States Constitution
Author:Michael Gerson
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“This failure of nerve already was manifest in the selection and confirmation process of Clarence Thomas. Bush's choice of Thomas caught most black leaders off guard. Few had the courage to say publicly that this was an act of cynical tokenism concealed by outright lies about Thomas being the most qualified candidate regardless of race. Thomas had an undistinguished record as a student (mere graduation from Yale Law School does not qualify one for the Supreme Court); he left thirteen thousand age discrimination cases dying on the vine for lack of investigation in his turbulent eight years at the EEOC; and his performance during his short fifteen months as an appellate court judge was mediocre. The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent. The point here is not simply that if Thomas were white they would have no trouble shouting this fact from the rooftops. The point is also that their silence reveals that black leaders may entertain the possibility that the racist stereotype may be true.”

1994TokenismScotusClarence ThomasRacial StereotypesThe Pitfalls Of Racial Reasoning
Book:Race Matters
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