Court Decisions Quotes

The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen - in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case - that they have become markedly more skeptical.

In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

Justice is determined by the personality of the judges.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

The (Supreme) Court has shown in the past that the Constitution can also be twisted to frustrate the needs of democracy

'Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

One big reason liberals come across as intolerant of ordinary Americans today is their preference for court decisions and regulatory mandates over democratically debated and approved legislation. This preference for working around the people’s elected representatives feeds all-or-nothing outcomes that are devoid of the accommodations and compromises which almost always feature in any legislative solution. It is these accommodations and compromises, moreover, that help make the outcome acceptable even to the losing side.

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.

The Warren Court wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution... I intend to succeed where they failed.

Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.

The court stands less than tall when it defers hearing a case for political reasons.

I can tell you as a black person in South Carolina whose grandparents grew up through Jim Crow, when you lose the courts and justice no longer becomes just, we're in a world of trouble.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

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.

Great judges are also great teachers.

The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such questions. We [Republicans] will submit to its decisions; and if you [Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter.

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

Far from definitively resolving the assisted suicide issue, the court's decisions seem to assure that the debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia is not yet over - and may have only begun.

We all come to the [Supreme] Court with our bags fully packed. What we take out of them may not have been used before, but they were there.

The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.

The Supreme Court today is plagued by a vision of the Constitution which is cramped and narrow.

Conservatives who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the plain meaning of its language and the original intent of the Framers have long been troubled by the court's decisions expanding the commerce clause to authorize Congress to regulate the most local of matters within a state's borders.

We’re not the only court in the world. See what they (other nation’s courts) have to say.