Quotes About Justices

FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal.

The papers reveal that in several key abortion cases, justices were keenly interested in the perceived public reaction to their rulings - indicating that courts can be influenced by public sentiment.

We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

Congress quickly increased the number of Supreme Court Justices from seven to nine, enabling Grant to nominate two new members of the Court. The plan to pack the Court with Republican justices had worked.

I think that the justices were totally answering the way that they should. I think that the senators, as best I could tell, for the most part, Democrat and Republican, respected that.

Hillary Clinton will nominate justices to the Supreme Court who are prepared to overturn Citizens United and end the movement toward oligarchy that we are seeing in this country.

In the final scene of Power, the Supreme Court justices appear as a striking abstraction: Nine scowling masks line up in a row on top of a giant podium. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speaks the majority opinion: 'Water power, the right to convert it into electric energy, and the electric energy thus produced constitute property belonging to the United States.

The traditional practice is that the justices don't ask the attorney general any questions, so as not to embarrass him. But Bobby Kennedy had let them know that he didn't mind if they asked him questions and they did.

I've learned that the Court will continue to change the meaning of the Constitution. Although all of the Justices have expressed the importance of judicial restraint, the Court inevitably makes new law every time it interprets the Constitution.

Anytime a member of Congress wants to travel abroad - which we do from time to time as part of our official duties - we are required to check with the House Committee on Ethics as to whether the trip follows the ethics rules by which federally elected officials are bound. Not so with Supreme Court justices.

I don't think we should have justices appointed that decide what they want to hear. It's all about the Constitution the way it was meant to be. And those are the people that I will appoint.

I don't think we should have justices appointed that decide what they want to hear.

constitutional revision commission. Simultaneously, Smith was becoming more involved with his profession through the American Bar Association. He met and became close to Lewis Powell of Virginia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of New York, future justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. He says, "Powell appointed me to a committee

We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the court's own legitimacy and authority.

Unanimity is important because it signals that the justices can rise above their differences and interpret the law without partisanship.

but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?

Conservative Justices have a history of not standing by their professed commitment to judicial restraint.

I think the nine justices think the solicitor general is the 35th clerk.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the Engel decision practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools. Engel and other cases did more than anything else over time to arouse the religious Right from its political quietism. Other Americans, too, thought that the justices had lost their minds.20

What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

We need more justices who will uphold the Constitution, follow the rule of law, and protect our Montana way of life.

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.

Justices look solemn in their formal black robes, but every so often they like to have a little fun by taking on a strange case, or overturning a presidential election, that sort of thing.