Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

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

We can't pick and choose when to adhere to the Constitution and when to cast it aside.

Over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States.

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.

Do judges follow the Constitution? Well, Yes and No. They follow the Constitution as they understand it.

I say that the responsibility of the judiciary is to uphold the Constitution, not rewrite it.

It would be a novel and dangerous doctrine that a legislature could change the constitution under which it held its existence.

David Addington does not believe in the Constitution

If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned

I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it. The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it and I must conform to this and do my best to see that it is carried out in this country.

Judgments that give an impression that we can disregard the Constitution for political expediency, or to solve what we regard as current problems, set a dangerous precedence which will make it difficult to govern in future or to make ordinary citizens to abide by the Constitution.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.

Nothing is above the Constitution.

For those of us on the front lines fighting Washington's power grabs, Judge Gorsuch's commitment to interpreting the Constitution and the laws as they are actually written is welcome news.

I am a constitutionalist. I believe in the constitution. I don't believe in altering the constitution.

My touchstone for every question is the Constitution.

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

A federal judge did as he was supposed to do and upheld the Constitution. We should be thankful that we have judiciary that will do that.

The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. This is the very essence of judicial duty.

The (Supreme) Court has shown in the past that the Constitution can also be twisted to frustrate the needs of democracy

… so as not to hazard the Constitution.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

It is arrogant to pretend that ... we can gauge accurately the intent of the Framers [of the Constitution] on application of principle to specific, contemporary questions.