Quotes from William H. Rehnquist

he followed up his Mayflower speech with one of his famous "fireside chats," urging the need for the Court plan and assuring his nationwide audience that he had no desire to be a dictator.

The justices were not appointed to roam at large in the realm of public policy and strike down laws that offend their own ideas of what is desirable and what is undesirable.

But no serious student of the subject would claim that the constitutional grant of authority to Congress to regulate "commerce among the several states" was limited to the regulation of sailing ships and stagecoaches to the exclusion of steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes.

The New Deal Court was now in place. It had already sounded the death knell for such doctrines of the old Court as "freedom of contract," and a limiting view of congressional authority under the Commerce Clause.

But there is no reason to doubt that it will continue as a vital and uniquely American institutional participant in the everlasting search of civilized society for the proper balance between liberty and authority, between the state and the individual.

Every judge who has sat on a case involving a constitutional claim must have surely experienced the feeling that the particular law being challenged was either unjust or silly or vindictive. It is unfortunately all too easy to translate these visceral reactions into a determination to find some way to hold the law unconstitutional.

Driving back on that hot June day past some government buildings, the Justice commented that he thought one of the great harms wrought by central air conditioning was that it had enabled the government in Washington to function during the summer, rather than closing up shop and leaving people alone the way it had formerly done.

a frank acknowledgment that there is not under our Constitution a judicial remedy for every political mischief, for every undesirable exercise of legislative power.

All of these factors are subsumed to a greater or lesser extent by observing that the Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity. The well-known checks and balances provided by the framers of the Constitution have supplied the necessary centrifugal force to make the Court independent of Congress and the president. The

Chief Justice Hughes once said that he tried to write his opinions clearly and logically, but if he needed the fifth vote of a colleague who insisted on putting in a paragraph that did not "belong," in it went, and he let the law reviews figure out what it meant.

The framers reconciled in a somewhat rough-hewn way the need for an antimajoritarian institution such as the Supreme Court to interpret a written constitution within a broader system of government basically committed to majority rule.

President Franklin Roosevelt failed in his effort to pack the Court in 1937, but in the midst of that battle the Court significantly altered its constitutional doctrine in a way that served to placate its opponents.