Antonin Scalia Quotes

Ultra-liberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.

The experience of being a prosecutor gives us a sort of proctologists view of our society.

The Marshals were founded when our nation was founded and from the earliest period, one of their key tasks has been apprehension. They are our fugitive enforcers in this country.

Trump will be America's law and order president, and I look forward to working with him as the law and order governor of Virginia.

I'm fairly conservative on social issues, but not extremely conservative and not reactionary.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

Doing a thing by law, or according to law, is only carrying the law into execution. And punishing a man by, or according to, the sentence or judgment of his peers, is only carrying that sentence or judgment into execution.

As a former attorney general. I have the greatest respect for the criminal justice system. But it is not good at intelligence gathering.

Law and order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick, medicine must be administered.

As a former home secretary, I have access to and knowledge of the workings of the system in a way that individuals unfamiliar with the courts can never hope to have.

The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well.

We cannot build foundations of a state without rule of law.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

When the penalty for a policeman's mistake is to put a criminal back out on the street, then we are hurting America; we are hurting our law-abiding citizens.

No one should be allowed to violently trample on the law.

Plea bargaining is a system that is best described as one of condemnation without adjudication. It is a system that replaces trial, which is what our constitution intended, with deals… those deals are coerced. The prosecutor is basically forcing people to waive their rights to jury trial by threatening them with ever greater sanctions if they refuse to plead and instead demand the right to jury trial.

The States have always borne primary responsibility for operating the machinery of criminal justice within their borders, and adapting it to their peculiar circumstances.

They got the judges / They got the lawyers / They got the jury rolls / They got the law / They don’t come by ones. / They got the sheriffs / They got the deputies / They don’t come by twos. / They got the shotguns / They got the rope / We git the justice / In the end / And they come by tens.

I am not defying a federal court order. I am merely carrying out my obligation to preserve the peace.

All lawyers are the natural enemies of the police.

If you hang them all, you will get the guilty. But that's not the American way of doing things.

Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

Law enforcement does not ask an advantage in its struggle with the lawless. It asks only that the scales of justice be balanced. The cause of justice is not served when hardened criminals are allowed to go free through legal technicalities.

The highest test of a people's fitness for free institutions is their willingness to obey law.