Tom Coburn Quotes

That very document [Constitution] does little to serve people when Supreme Court decisions are written so that even high-priced lawyers can't figure them out.

You just never know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

Because it's important. Laws can be reversed, Supreme Court decisions can be overturned, gender classifications can continue.

Law must be viewed as a formless mass of isolated decisions.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor serves as a model Supreme Court justice, widely recognized as a jurist with practical values, a sense of the consequences of the legal decisions being made by the Supreme Court.

I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

I’ve chosen not to challenge the rule of law, because in our system there really is no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. When the Supreme Court makes a decision, no matter how strongly one disagrees with it, one faces a choice –are we, in John Adams’ phrase, a nation of laws, or is it a contest made on raw power?

There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.

The Supreme Court has also issued and never reversed a number of decisions that are repugnant to the Constitution's vision of human dignity and equality.

The most important career decision you'll make is who your life partner is.

Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.

There are forces in life working for you and against you. One must distinguish the beneficial forces from the malevolent ones and choose correctly between them.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,- that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances.

If elected president I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice. And the nominee will say, we are going to overturn this disastrous decision on Citizens United because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaires should be allowed to buy politicians.

In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.

When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way.

Once one becomes a man, he can and must make his own decisions. But I do offer warning. Even a good thing can become destructive if taken to excess.

Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.

If you go back and look at the history of Supreme Court fights from the very beginning there is a corresponding interest, and and the intent of the interest of the Senate with, as it relates to the probability that the next appointee would alter the balance in the court.

To add to the confusion, some of the court's decisions involved multiple concurrences and dissents, making it hard even for lawyers and judges to figure out what the law is and why.

If you and I go into a store to rob it, and I say "shoot," that's not protected. Like all judicial decisions and legislation, this leaves plenty of gray areas, including many of great significance that are rarely discussed: advocacy of imminent war crimes, such as aggression, for example. I think we would all agree that such speech should be protected, despite the often horrific consequences, but it's worth noting that that stretches the doctrine to its limits.

In decision after decision on the bench, Judge [Samuel] Alito has excused abusive actions by the authorities that intrude on the personal privacy and freedoms of average Americans.