The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.
We can't bypass our heritage. We can't bypass the knowledge of who we are. You don't take a DNA test to see if you believe in freedom. Freedom is taught, and teaching the Constitution - I won't go on too much.
We hold that same sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states.
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.
As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.
Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.
Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.
If the case is close, 5-4, and let's say you are on the side that prevailed with the majority, there are not a lot of high-fives and back slaps. There is a moment of quiet, a moment of respect, maybe even sometimes awe in the process. We realize that one of us is going to have to write out a decision which teaches and gives reasons for what we do.
The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act.
