Warren E. Burger Quotes

The real difficulty is not with the Constitution but with the judges who interpret it.

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

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

Do judges follow the Constitution? Well, Yes and No. They follow the Constitution as they understand it.

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

What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?

There's no such thing as judicial supremacy.

The Court's primary duty, in short, is not to minimize its role or avoid friction with the political branches, but to try as best it can to get the Constitution right.

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.... There should be, therefore, great resistance to ... redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority.

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our property and our liberty and our property under the Constitution.

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.

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

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 right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.

Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn't some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams.

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

The Constitution is what the judges say it is.

As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

The Declaration of Independence...is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

My feeling is that the judge has a responsibility to the Constitution first, precedent second. Precedent is one factor. It is not the only factor. If it was the only factor, then, you know, we wouldn't have had Roe vs. Wade. We wouldn't have had Griswold. We wouldn't have had Lawrence. We wouldn't have had all these cases which the Left love.

The judicial power of every well-constituted government must be coextensive with the legislative, and must be capable of deciding every judicial question which grows out of the Constitution and laws.