Judicial Approach Quotes

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.

I've got that hands-on experience with federal judges and how important it is to have judges like Neil Gorsuch, who will take a rule-of-law approach to the decision-making process. I think he's eminently qualified.

I … think it is safer, when a practical question arises, to decide that question directly, and not indirectly, by deciding a general abstraction supposed to include it, and also including a great deal more.

Not that I've always agreed with what she said - far from it - but Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been properly lauded, in my view, as a judge who approached her duties with open-mindedness and with a sensitivity that affects her decisions would have on everyday, ordinary people.

Israel's Supreme Court is one of the best in the world, and I think that it should stay that way; I don't want to weaken it, I just want to change its approach.

I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

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 judicial philosophy is straightforward.

I think personally, I've always felt that the Association [NAACP] got itself hung-up in what I call its legal successes. Having had so many outstanding legal successes, it definitely seemed to have oriented its thinking in the direction that the way to achieve was through the courts.

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

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor brought critical qualities to the high court that not everybody thinks are qualities - I happen to think they are - her pragmatism and her state craft.

This is the difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals want justices to vote a certain way. We, conservatives, want a particular legal philosophy, a philosophy for how to interpret the Constitution.

Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.