Frank H. Easterbrook Quotes

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

To implement real limits on government the judges must have reference to standards which are external to, and prior to, the matter to be decided. This is necessarily historical investigation. The content of those standards are set at their creation. Recourse to the intention of the framers in judicial review, therefore, can be understood as indispensable to realizing the idea of government limited by law.

The Constitution of the United States is not a suicide pact.

The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

We are not at liberty to add one jot of power to the national government beyond what the people have granted by the constitution

The Constitution is a list of things the government may not do.

Only its [the Constitution's] great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced by the nature of the objects themselves.

The whole point of the Constitution is to limit at some point and in some way popular will.

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

A Constitution is not meant to be a flexible arrangement which evolves from one decade to another depending on political expediency.

A constitution, in the American sense of the word, is a written instrument by which the fundamental powers of the government are established, limited, and defined, and by which these powers are distributed among several departments, for their more safe and useful exercise, for the benefit of the body politic.

The U.S. constitution is an extraordinary document. In my view, it should not be amended often.

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

The Constitution is government's stop sign. It says, you - the three branches of government - can go so far and no farther.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power.

The courts are under the Constitution, not over it.

The Constitution is simply a sign that says “keep off the grass.”

The Constitution is a document that SHOULD be beyond argument.

The purpose of a written constitution is to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights.

The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental rights of private property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.

The Constitution is ... power. That is why we see political struggle over the selection of judges who will wield that power.

The federal constitution is perhaps the greatest of human experiments.

... the opinion of the Supreme Court ... ought not to control the co-ordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court, must each be guided by its own opinion of the constitution.