Jonathan Turley Quotes

Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.

A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, 'This is my theory... and this is what I'm going to be faithful to and consistent with,' and in twenty years will look back and say, 'I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area.'

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

Whatever may have been the intention of the framers of a constitution, or of a law, that intention is to be sought for in the instrument itself, according to the usual and established rules of construction.

The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

I think it's important for the American people to know that the position of originalism isn't itself an originalist position.

It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

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

What, then, should a constitutional jurisprudence actually be? It should be a jurisprudence of Original Intention.... The original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes [is] the only reliable guide for judgment.

Every Constitution embodies the principles of its framers. It is a transcript of their minds. If its meaning in any place is open to doubt, or if words are used which seem to have no fixed signification, we cannot err if we turn to the framers; and their authority increases in proportion to the evidence which they left on the question.

A decision reflects judicial restraint if it upholds practices under constitutional attack. A decision reflects judicial activism if it invalidates practices under constitutional attack.

Original intent is a necessary fiction that jurists have invented to get a handle on the Constitution.

Legal doctrines ... derive meaning and content from the circumstances that gave rise to them and from the purposes they were designed to serve. To these they are bound as is a live tree to its roots

I think it is up to the judge to say what the Constitution provided, even if what it provided is not the best answer, even if you think it should be amended. If that's what it says, that's what it says.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

During my years as a practicing lawyer, it just was part of your study of what Congress was trying to say in their statutes. I never really considered judges or scholars as either those who used legislative history or those who were opposed to it until after I got on the court.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

I'm an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.

One of the challenges for lawyers can be explaining, first of all, what the legal issue is and, second, its significance. And both of those are important.

What many people, I think, don't really understand is how much their rights really turn on the interpretation of the Supreme Court.

As a general rule, I do not think judges should consider current societal preferences when ruling on constitutional challenges.

I'm clearly not a major legal genius.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.