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“[T]he ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.”
—Felix Frankfurter, Graves v. New York, 306 US 466 (1939)
“[P]ersonal freedom is best maintained ... when it is ingrained in a people's habits and not enforced against popular policy by the coercion of adjudicated law.”
—Felix Frankfurter, Graves v. New York, 306 US 466 (1939)
“If the function of this Court is to be essentially no different from that of a legislature, if the considerations governing constitutional construction are to be substantially those that underlie legislation, then indeed judges should not have life tenure and they should be made directly responsible to the electorate.”
—Felix Frankfurter, Graves v. New York, 306 US 466 (1939)
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
—Learned Hand, Speech at 'I Am An American Day', Central Park, New York (May 20, 1945)
“The [Supreme] Court's authority -- possessed neither of the purse nor the sword -- ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the Court's complete detachment, in fact and appearance, from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces and political settlements.”
—Earl Warren: A Political Biography by Earl Katcher (1967)
“The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less than the right to speak out or the right to travel, is, in truth, a 'personal right'.”
—Potter Stewart, Lynch vs. HFC (1972)
“In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.”
—Robert Bork, American Enterprise Institute (1984)
“Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.”
—Robert Bork, The Tempting of America
“The judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the law and not his personal values. That is why the American public accepts the decisions of its courts, accepts even decisions that nullify the laws a majority of the electorate or their representatives voted for.”
—Robert Bork, Opening statement at hearings to become associate justice of the US Supreme Court, 1987
“[W]hen a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.”
—Robert Bork, Opening statement at hearings to become associate justice of the US Supreme Court, 1987
“There is a tendency among young upwardly mobile, intelligent minorities today to forget. We forget the sweat of our forefathers. We forget the blood of the marchers, the prayers and hope of our race. We forget who brought us into this world. We overlook who put food in our mouths and clothes on our backs. We forget commitment to excellence. We procreate with pleasure and retreat from the responsibilities of the babies we produce. We subdue, we seduce, but we don't respect ourselves, our women, our babies. How do we expect a race that has been thrown into the gutter of socio-economic indicators to rise above these humiliating circumstances if we hide from responsibility for our own destiny?”
—Clarence Thomas, Savannah State College (June 9, 1985)
“This is a circus. It is a national disgrace.... [I]t is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
—Clarence Thomas, Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (1991) |
