Legal Debate Quotes

This pro-choice issue is a legal issue that should be decided by the courts.

Proposals to abolish the death penalty demnstrate an effeminacy in the general mind of the country.

Legalizing homosexuality is not the first step on a slippery slope to legalizing everything.

A Supreme Court ruling is supposed to provide clarity to contentious legal issues, but in the case of reproductive rights, it was just the beginning of a long, heated, and grueling debate.

Whether the Constitution allows indictment of a sitting president is debatable.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court spent over an hour listening to arguments on whether Obamacare is unconstitutional. Yeah, listening to arguments about Obamacare for an hour, or as most people call that, 'Thanksgiving Dinner.'

My view is instead of political discussions, persuasions, which dominate democracy, in our country we have taken our democracy to the other extreme. There is no debate, sufficient debate. There is court debate.

Judge [Samuel Alito], there's a genuine struggle going on well beyond you, well beyond the Congress, in America about how to read the Constitution.

I want to commend the [Federalist] Society for bringing together the best minds from right, left, and center to debate the most pressing legal issues of the day.

Upon the Constitution, upon the pre-existing legal rights of the People, as understood in this country and in England, I have argued that this House is bound to revive the Petition under debate.

This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment.

I support capital punishment. But let's be clear: It's a decision for each state to make.

The declaration that any legal issue is "not an open question in a law school" is a declaration of war upon everything that a law school is. Most fundamentally, a law school is a place of intellectual inquiry, where the acceptability of ideas can only be determined by examining them.

Ending up in the right place in this debate requires starting in the right place. The right place to start is the proper discrimination of what judges are supposed to do, and the rest of the process should reflect this judicial job description.

He [Louis Brandeis] would have not had any patience with that great debate which you're right to kind of signal between Justice Scalia and Justice Alito about do you need a physical trespass into the home or onto the carriage in order to trigger the values of the Fourth Amendment.

Every trial lawyer knows what it is like to sit patiently while the other side puts on its case. Inevitably they make a few points that appeal to the jury, and waiting for the opportunity to respond can be painful. The desire to jump up immediately - to point out the flaws in logic or the factual distortions - is often overpowering.

I asked Chief Justice John Roberts about this definition of life - you know, what is life? The Supreme Court can't figure it out or doesn't want us to figure it out; the fact that we know that there is no life if there's no heartbeat and brainwaves.

We have a problem with judicial activism in this country.

I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.

It's tough to get two lawyers to agree on anything.

The truth of the matter is there is significant debate among judicial scholars today as to whether or not we've gone off on the wrong path with regard to Supreme Court decisions.