Quotes about Judicial Discourse

John Quincy Adams

Polk...is just qualified for an eminent County Court lawyer....He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no eloquence of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.

After his Presidency, Adams served in the House of Representatives for many years and was thus active in politics.

Neal Katyal

There is no doubt that dissents can serve a useful role by explaining when a justice thinks the majority has gone off the deep end. But unanimity also sends its own powerful message - one that might be eclipsed in the headlines by a sensational dissent but could ultimately have a greater impact.

Neal Katyal

Justice Scalia was usually particularly challenging to me at oral argument, but I so respected his intellect and commitment to the pursuit of truth.

Merrick Garland

Everybody, I think, who hopes to become a judge would aspire to be able to write as well as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. None are going to be able to attain that.

William O. Douglas

The fact that there is a five-to-four decision usually means that there is at hand a five-to-four problem. Judges are not perverse; they look for unanimity, not disagreement.

Marcia Clark

I don't think any prosecutor should walk into a courtroom and think they're going to wow a jury with catchphrases and cliches and that kind of performance.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I think some of my colleagues' spicier lines are distracting. They draw attention away from what the justice is trying to say.

Edward Whalen

The “gaffe” gives Scalia’s critics ample occasion to deride the error, and I won’t fault then for having fun doing so, as I won’t dispute that I and others would likely be doing the same for a blunder for a liberal justice.

In his boisterous dissent he read from the bench in the EPA v. EME Homer City case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mistake and in citing a previous opinion he had written, he made an error recalling what he had written previously. Critics of the justice not only castigated him but made fun of his seemingly foolish error that a law student should not make. Whalen’s quotation is important because it illustrated the highly partisan tone in American politics at that. Whalen, a partisan conservative explains how he would do the same thing if a liberal judge made a mistake. The error was corrected in the final published version of the opinion, and it did not affect the logic of the dissent or even the factual arguments for the dissent. Yet the quest for partisan advantage and trashing a political opponent was so in vogue that a minor mistake was treated as a major political scandal. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st were not the most partisan and nasty era of American politics but it was one of the worst.

Judicial Discourse Quotes