David Stras Quotes

One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

Candidly, Justice Thomas, I do not believe that you were indeed the most competent person to be on the Supreme Court.

There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers, and they are entitled to a little representation [on the Supreme Court], aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos and stuff like that.

I don’t see why a Supreme Court justice has to have previous experience as a judge.

The process has failed to prevent the President, the Senate, or both, from caring primarily about the immediate political gains of an appointment, and thus from being indifferent or even consciously opposed to considering any of the factors truly relevant to selecting competent jurists.

Judge Kavanaugh has an exemplary record of service to the judiciary and the rule of law.

(H)er qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent. She is not a brilliant jurist, indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or public forum. Were she not a friend of Bush, and female, she would never have even been considered.

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.

Roosevelt got a chance to name an amazing nine justices of the Supreme Court. He was not namby-pamby on this question. He wanted people who shared his views, he wanted liberals, and he wanted lots of them.

What I wanted was for everyone listening to understand that these things mattered - not necessarily for me, but in this particular forum they mattered in terms of whether of not we were getting a person who should sit on the Supreme Court.

I have been a judge for 15 years and I've made up my own mind during all that time.

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

He has selected from a group of overwhelming candidates. This candidate was nominated to the Supreme Court because of his extremely overwhelming qualifications.

There are a lot of wonderful people in America who shouldn't be on the Supreme Court - and a lot who should be on the court who aren't such wonderful people.

I think the nine justices think the solicitor general is the 35th clerk.

Judge Taney requests the American people to believe that the framers of the Constitution did not know their own minds. For the same Statesmen who drew up the Constitution, (which he says forbids Congress to prohibit Slavery in the Territories,) adopted the Ordinance of '87, which prohibited it in all the Territories we then had. The Ordinance was passed in July, 1787 -- the Constitution was framed in September of the same year. The same States and the same men ratified both. And one of the first acts of the first Congress under the Constitution was to reaffirm the Ordinance, and to again prohibit Slavery! Which are the best interpreters of the Constitution, the opinions of Mr. Chief Justice Taney, or the ACTS of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Monroe, Adams, and Washington?

Are we to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it?

The Supreme Court has made itself into a political institution … It has become a political prize and a political position.

The choice of "fundamental values" by the [Supreme] Court cannot be justified. Where constitutional materials do not clearly specify the value to be preferred, there is no principled way to prefer any claimed human value to any other. The judge must stick close to the text and history, and their fair implications, and not construct any new rights.

If the Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, prevents the proper solution of our social and economic problems, should we do something to the Constitution to meet the difficulty, or should we do something to the Supreme Court?

I was driven years ago to the conclusion that political considerations had not hurt the character of appointments here [the supreme court].

if you want the original intent of the writers of the constitution or the legislation to be the deciding factor, we should appoint 9 historians to the court.

The perception of the Supreme Court as a political court in most constitutional cases and many nonconstitutional ones derives from the fact that the justices form confident views without any empirical basis for them.

In 'Bush v. Gore,' five justices had a partisan outcome in mind and then made up the judicial principle to justify it, while claiming that the decision would not be precedent for any future cases.