William Barr Quotes

There's no such thing as judicial supremacy.

We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

The most fundamental question of all the legitimacy of judicial review itself.

I also believe that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of all federal questions.

I'll have you understand I am running this court, and the law hasn't got a damn thing to do with it!

You want to know what judicial activism is? Judicial activism is judges imposing their policy preferences on the words of the Constitution.

'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

The judges’ individual sense of justice ... might result in a benevolent despotism if the judges were benevolent men. [But] It would put an end to the reign of law

People’s lives and fortunes have been relinquished to renegade judges, a robed contemptuous elite.

We must keep in mind the vast power entrusted to Federal judges. They never stand for election. Once appointed, they serve for life. The havoc that a Federal District Court Judge can wreak is substantial.

The [Supreme] Court did not interpret the Constitution—the court amended it.

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

… a clear abuse of judicial power

The appelate jurisdiction of the Supreme Federal Court, includes an unwarrantable stretch of power over the liberty, life, and property of the subject, through the wide Continent of America.

The federal judiciary is an irresponsible body … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction ...

This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.

The Supreme Court only hears the cases that it wants to hear.

With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them - with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the 'reasoned judgment' of a bare majority of this Court - we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

The courts have become grotesquely dictatorial and far too powerful.

If judicial review means anything, it is that judicial restraint does not allow everything.

The overreach of the judiciary can be attributed to, one, the inability of the executive to deliver; and two, the tendency to issue judicial pronouncements for national good. The second element is dangerous because that's the function of the government.

Without any direction from Congress, our judicial branch has unilaterally created and defined qualified immunity.

Proponents of nationwide injunctions argue that they are necessary to ensure that the law is uniform throughout the country. But the federal judiciary wasn't made to produce instant legal uniformity.