I spent my junior year in Switzerland. On the way back home, I spent some time in England, and I remember going to Hyde Park Corner. And there was a Roman Catholic priest in his collar, standing on a soapbox, preaching the Catholic faith and being heckled by a group. And I thought, 'My goodness.' I thought that was admirable.
The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.
But I'm not pro death penalty. I - I'm just anti the notion that it is not a matter for democratic choice, that it has been taken away from the democratic choice of the people by a provision of the Constitution.
As a general rule, I do not think it appropriate for judges to heap either praise or censure upon a legislative measure that comes before them, lest it be thought that their validation, invalidation, or interpretation of it is driven by their desire to expand or constrict what they personally approve or disapprove as a matter of policy.
Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best. Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately, but respectfully, attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views.
With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them - with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the 'reasoned judgment' of a bare majority of this Court - we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
In a big family the first child is kind of like the first pancake. If it's not perfect, that's okay, there are a lot more coming along.
It is not rational, never mind 'appropriate,' to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.
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?
The court makes an amazing amount of decisions that ought to be made by the people.
The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error.
I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.
It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment.
By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.
The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society.
If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.
If you condemn someone who has committed a crime to be tortured, that would be unconstitutional.
