Anthony Kennedy Quotes
One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society. It does not follow that each of those essential rights is one that we as judges can enforce under the written Constitution. The Due Process Clause is not a guarantee of every right that should inhere in an ideal system.
Anthony Kennedy, Unenumerated Rights and the Dictates of Judicial Restraint. Address to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, 1986
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Note the use of the phrase “against the government.” One of the unique aspects of the American Constitution and The Bill of Rights is that the government is considered a potential and even probable infringer on the liberties of the people. It is almost as though the government was the potential enemy. Modern libertarians state this very explicitly and it is ever present in the views of both the right and left wings of American politics. Most centrists recoil at the thought that some citizens see the government as the enemy, but even in America there have been times where the government has infringed on the rights of citizens only to have the courts or future administrations and Congresses correct the error.
Hayward claimed that Wilson was the first American President who ever criticized the American Constitution. Many do not agree as Madison and Jefferson in part, along with most other Americans, found the Constitution so wanting that it was ratified only on condition of the passage of the Bill of Rights. Jackson, was distressed by the limitations on the President and many others had their objections, but Wilson, before he became a politician was a prominent academic political scientist and wrote voluminously and had an intellectual following so his criticism was not considered so “political” as others.
Sealed under duress and later repudiated by the King with Papal assistance
Jefferson and some of the other Founding Fathers saw the American experiment as having implications for the whole world. To Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence was not just for Americans but ideally for all mankind.
Hamilton acknowledged that the major public objection to the new U. S. Constitution was its lack of a Bill of Rights, which Hamilton argued was unnecessary.
Jefferson’s original was: We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all …
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions.
