Robert H. Jackson Quotes

Every state has an undoubted right to determine the status, or domestic and social condition, of the persons domiciled within its territory except insofar as the powers of the states in this respect are restrained, or duties and obligations imposed upon them, by the Constitution of the United States.

The 'takings' clause of the Fifth Amendment is for conservatives what the equal protection clause of the 14th is for liberals.

Second, marriage is an issue that our Founding Fathers wisely left to the states.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation.

The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever... The Legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of the owners, or without paying the owners previous to their emancipation a full equivalent in money for the slaves so emancipated. They shall have no power to prevent immigrants to the State from bringing with them such persons as are deemed slaves by the laws of any one of the United States or Territories, so long as any person of the same age or description shall be continued in slavery by the laws of this State: Provided, That such person or slave be the bona fide property of such immigrants

The power of eminent domain is essential to a sovereign government.

The power of eminent domain is merely the means to an end.

All constitutional laws are binding on all the people, in the new States and in the old ones, whether they consent to be bound by them or not.

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

I'd think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires.

The EPA must be forbidden to seize or destroy the property of any person until and unless such person has been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.

If Parliament may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?

The physical power to get the money does not seem to me a test of the right to tax. Might does not make right even in taxation. To hold that what the use of official authority may get the state may keep, and that if it cannot get hold of a nonresident stockholder it may hold the company as hostage for him, is strange constitutional doctrine to me.

Let’s shut down the EPA. The state knows best how to protect resources.

Income and inheritance taxes imply the denial of private property, and in that are different in principle from all other taxes. The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.

Thirdly, the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires, that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that, by entering into society, which was the end for which they entered into it; too gross an absurdity for any man to own.

What I know is that taxation, as far as liberal Democrats are concerned, is not about money. It's about power.

The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State. It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, genuine freedom of contract, the rights of public meeting and association, and finally its own power to carry out common objects undefeated by the recalcitrance of individual members.

The [tenth] amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".

For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

I'm deeply concerned about Jeff Sessions, who has clearly expressed opposition to the use of consent decrees and has advanced a lot of this states' rights rhetoric.