Zitat des Tages von David Souter:
I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great that when the term of court starts, I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.
There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.
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.
Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.
Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.
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.
There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.
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.
The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.
Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had the power to issue commands to the several sovereign states, but it had no authority to govern individuals directly.
I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.
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.
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.
While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.
It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.
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.
What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible.
I retired when the Supreme Court rose for the summer recess in 2009, and a couple of weeks later I drove north from Washington with no regrets about the prior 19 years or about the decision to try living a more normal life for whatever time might remain.
If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.
The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.