text:
Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who served for 29 years, from 1986 until his death. He was appointed to the Court by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

1980s

 * This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck's aphorism that 'No man should see how laws or sausages are made.'
 * Community Nutrition Institute v. Block, 749 F.2d 50, 51 (D.C. Cir. 1984); decided December 5, 1984.

 * I define speech as any communicative activity. [Can it be nonverbal?] Yes. [Can it be nonverbal and also not written?] Yes. [Can it encompass physical actions?] Yes. Watt [Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Watt, 703 F.2d 586 (1983)] was a case in which what was at issue was sleeping as communicative activity. What I said was that for purposes of the heightened protections that are accorded, sleeping could not be speech. That is to say, I did not say that one could prohibit sleeping merely for the purpose of eliminating the communicative aspect of sleeping, if there is any . . . [and] I did not say that the Government could seek to prohibit that communication without running afoul of the heightened standards of the first amendment. If they passed a law that allows all other sleeping but only prohibits sleeping where it is intended to communicate, then it would be invalidated. But what I did say was, where you have a general law that just applies to an activity which in itself is normally not communicative, such as sleeping, spitting, whatever you like; clenching your fist, for example; such a law would not be subject to the heightened standards of the first amendment. That is to say, if there is ordinary justification for it, it is fine. It does not have to meet the high need, the no other available alternative requirements of the first amendment. Whereas, when you are dealing with communicative activity, naturally communicative activity—writing, speech, and so forth— any law, even if it is general, across the board, has to meet those higher standards.
 * Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, (8/5/1986), transcript at pp. 51-52).

 * In law school, I never understood [antitrust law]. I later found out, in reading the writings of those who now do understand it, that I should not have understood it because it did not make any sense then.
 * On Antitrust law: Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, 8/5/1986, transcript at p. 36).

 * Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.
 * Morrison v. Olsen, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988) (dissenting).

 * Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-by-case basis.
 * On legislating from the bench: Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654 (1988) (dissenting).

 * How frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but to investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile.
 * On the independent counsel law: Morrison v. Olson (1988) (dissenting).

 * Those who believe that racial preferences can help to 'even the score' display, and reinforce, a manner of thinking about race that was the source of the injustice and that will, if it endures within our society, be the source of more injustice still.
 * On affirmative action: Richmond v. Croson Co. (1989) (concurring).

 * Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.
 * Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co., 491 U.S. 1 (1989) (concurring in part and dissenting in part).

 * We reject the dissent's contention that our approach, by "largely return[ing] the task of defining the contours of Eighth Amendment protection to political majorities," leaves "‘[c]onstitutional doctrine [to] be formulated by the acts of those institutions which the Constitution is supposed to limit,'" [...] By reaching a decision supported neither by constitutional text nor by the demonstrable current standards of our citizens, the dissent displays a failure to appreciate that "those institutions which the Constitution is supposed to limit" include the Court itself. To say, as the dissent says, that "‘it is for us ultimately to judge whether the Eighth Amendment permits imposition of the death penalty,'" (quoting Enmund v. Florida) -- and to mean that as the dissent means it, i.e., that it is for us to judge, not on the basis of what we perceive the Eighth Amendment originally prohibited, or on the basis of what we perceive the society through its democratic processes now overwhelmingly disapproves, but on the basis of what we think "proportionate" and "measurably contributory to acceptable goals of punishment" -- to say and mean that, is to replace judges of the law with a committee of philosopher-kings.
 * Stanford v. Kentucky (1989) (plurality part, case later overruled by Roper); decided June 26, 1989.

 * The outcome of today's case will doubtless be heralded as a triumph of judicial statesmanship. It is not that, unless it is statesmanlike needlessly to prolong this Court's self-awarded sovereignty over a field where it has little proper business, since the answers to most of the cruel questions posed are political, and not juridical -- a sovereignty which therefore quite properly, but to the great damage of the Court, makes it the object of the sort of organized public pressure that political institutions in a democracy ought to receive. […] Ordinarily, speaking no more broadly than is absolutely required avoids throwing settled law into confusion; doing so today preserves a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count. Alone sufficient to justify a broad holding is the fact that our retaining control, through Roe, of what I believe to be, and many of our citizens recognize to be, a political issue, continuously distorts the public perception of the role of this Court. We can now look forward to at least another Term with carts full of mail from the public, and streets full of demonstrators, urging us -- their unelected and life-tenured judges who have been awarded those extraordinary, undemocratic characteristics precisely in order that we might follow the law despite the popular will -- to follow the popular will. Indeed, I expect we can look forward to even more of that than before, given our indecisive decision today. […] It was an arguable question today whether [Section] 188.029 of the Missouri law contravened this Court’s understanding of Roe v. Wade, and I would have examined Roe rather than examining the contravention. […] Of the four courses we might have chosen today -- to reaffirm Roe, to overrule it explicitly, to overrule it sub silentio, or to avoid the question -- the last is the least responsible. On the question of the constitutionality of [Section] 188.029, I concur in the judgment of the Court and strongly dissent from the manner in which it has been reached.
 * Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), 492 U.S. 490, No. 88-605; decided July 3, 1989

1990s

 * As I understand the various opinions today: One Justice holds that two-parent notification is unconstitutional (at least in present circumstances) without judicial bypass, but constitutional with bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is constitutional with or without bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is unconstitutional with or without bypass, though the four apply two different standards […]; six Justices hold that one-parent notification with bypass is constitutional, though for two different sets of reasons […]; and three Justices would hold that one-parent notification with bypass is unconstitutional […]. One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions and will find in our society’s tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not in the judges – workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.
 * On whether a state law may require notification of both parents before a minor can obtain an abortion; Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990, concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part), 497 U.S. 417, No. 88-605; decided June 25, 1990.

 * The Constitution contains no right to abortion. It is not to be found in the longstanding traditions of our society, nor can it be logically deduced from the text of the Constitution - not, that is, without volunteering a judicial answer to the nonjusticiable question of when human life begins. Leaving this matter to the political process is not only legally correct, it is pragmatically so. That alone - and not lawyerly dissection of federal judicial precedents - can produce compromises satisfying a sufficient mass of the electorate that this deeply felt issue will cease distorting the remainder of our democratic process. The Court should end its disruptive intrusion into this field as soon as possible.
 * Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, (1990, concurring), 497 U.S. 502; decided June 25,1990).

 * The point at which life becomes 'worthless,' and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become 'extraordinary' or 'inappropriate,' are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory...[therefore] even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored.
 * On the court's lack of authority regarding the right to die: Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990) (concurring).

 * I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however, actually constitutional, I would affirm the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals reversing the judgment of conviction.
 * Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990).

 * Today's extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.
 * Minnick v. Mississippi, 498 US 146 (1990) (dissenting).

 * The story is told of the elderly judge who, looking back over a long career, observes with satisfaction that, when I was young, I probably let stand some convictions that should have been overturned, and when I was old I probably set aside some that should have stood; so overall, justice was done. I sometimes think that is an appropriate analogy to this Court's constitutional jurisprudence, which alternately creates rights that the Constitution does not contain and denies rights that it does. Compare Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (right to abortion does exist) with Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990) (right to be confronted with witnesses, U.S. Const., Amdt. 6, does not).
 * County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44 (1991) (dissenting).

 * Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. . . . The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.
 * On decency laws: Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991) (concurring).

 * '''Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith.
 * Holmes v.SIPC, 503 U.S. 258 (1991) (concurring).

 * I think [that] '[t]he judicial Power of the United States' conferred upon this Court 'and such inferior courts as Congress may establish', must be deemed to be the judicial power as understood by our common-law tradition. That is the power 'to say what the law is', Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803), not the power to change it.
 * James M. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia, 501 U.S. 529 (1991) (concurring).

 * The Court's statement that it is 'tempting' to acknowledge the authoritativeness of tradition in order to 'curb the discretion of federal judges' is, of course, rhetoric rather than reality; no government official is 'tempted' to place restraints upon his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say 'Power tends to purify.' The Court's temptation is in the quite opposite and more natural direction -- towards systematically eliminating checks upon its own power; and it succumbs.
 * Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (dissenting).

 * In Barnette, we held that a public school student could not be compelled to recite the Pledge; we did not even hint that she could not be compelled to observe respectful silence. . . . Logically, that ought to be the next target for the Court's bulldozer.
 * On the Pledge of Allegiance: Lee v. Weisman (1992) (dissenting).

 * I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to 'require[e] scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary'. But interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
 * Lee v. Weisman (1992, dissenting); decided June 24, 1992.

 * The Court's reliance upon stare decisis can best be described as contrived. It insists upon the necessity of adhering not to all of Roe, but only to what it calls the 'central holding.' It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.
 * On stare decisis (adhering to judicial precedent): Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) (dissenting).

 * I frankly doubt, moreover, whether the fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment would have allowed themselves to be subjected, on mere suspicion of being armed and dangerous, to such indignity.
 * Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366 (1993) (concurring).

 * As to the Court's invocation of the Lemon test: Like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District. Its most recent burial, only last Term, was, to be sure, not fully six feet under: Our decision in Lee v. Weisman conspicuously avoided using the supposed test but also declined the invitation to repudiate it. Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature's heart (the author of today's opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so. The secret of the Lemon test's survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will.  Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.
 * Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398-99 (1993) (concurring) (citations omitted).

 * 'Abusive' (or 'hostile,' which in this context I take to mean the same thing) does not seem to me a very clear standard - and I do not think clarity is at all increased by adding the adverb objectively or by appealing to a reasonable person's notion of what the vague word means.
 * Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17 (1993) (concurring).

 * Justice Blackmun begins his statement [declaring Blackmun's opposition to capital punishment] by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us, the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern. The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. See McCollum v. North Carolina. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!
 * Callins v. Collins 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in denial of cert).

 * I have been willing, in the case of civil statutes, to acknowledge a doctrine of scrivener's error that permits a court to give an unusual (though not unheard of) meaning to a word which, if given its normal meaning, would produce an absurd and arguably unconstitutional result.
 * U.S. v. X-Citement Video Inc., 513 U.S. 64 (1994).

 * The Court today finds that the Powers That Be, up in Albany, have conspired to effect an establishment of the Satmar Hasidim. I do not know who would be more surprised at this discovery: the Founders of our Nation or Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, founder of the Satmar. The Grand Rebbe would be astounded to learn that after escaping brutal persecution and coming to America with the modest hope of religious toleration for their ascetic form of Judaism, the Satmar had become so powerful, so closely allied with Mammon, as to have become an establishment of the Empire State. And the Founding Fathers would be astonished to find that the Establishment Clause — which they designed to insure that no one powerful sect or combination of sects could use political or governmental power to punish dissenters — has been employed to prohibit characteristically and admirably American accommodation of the religious practices (or more precisely, cultural peculiarities) of a tiny minority sect. I, however, am not surprised. Once this Court has abandoned text and history as guides, nothing prevents it from calling religious toleration the establishment of religion.
 * Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet (1994) (dissenting) (citations and some internal quotation marks omitted).

 * Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution's focus upon the individual . . . . To pursue the concept of racial entitlement - even for the most admirable and benign of purposes - is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.
 * Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 239 (1995) (Scalia, J., concurring).

 * Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.
 * Speech at Princeton University (1995), as quoted in a Scalia profile published by The Christian Science Monitor.

 * The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a "'bare ... desire to harm' " homosexuals, ante, at 634, but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws. That objective, and the means chosen to achieve it, are not only unimpeachable under any constitutional doctrine hitherto pronounced (hence the opinion's heavy reliance upon principles of righteousness rather than judicial holdings); they have been specifically approved by the Congress of the United States and by this Court. In holding that homosexuality cannot be singled out for disfavorable treatment, the Court contradicts a decision, unchallenged here, pronounced only 10 years ago, see Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986), and places the prestige of this institution behind the proposition that opposition to homosexuality is as reprehensible as racial or religious bias. Whether it is or not is precisely the cultural debate that gave rise to the Colorado constitutional amendment (and to the preferential laws against which the amendment was directed.) Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about this subject, it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions in state constitutions. This Court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the Members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that "animosity" toward homosexuality, ante, at 634, is evil. I vigorously dissent.
 * Dissenting opinion in Romer v. Evans (decided 20 May, 1996), 517 U.S. 620, 636, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas

 * It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members' personal view of what would make a 'more perfect Union' (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a 'more perfect world') can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.
 * On judicial arrogance: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).

 * It is hard to consider women a 'discrete and insular minority', unable to employ the 'political processes ordinarily to be relied upon' when they constitute a majority of the electorate. And the suggestion that they are incapable of exerting that political power smacks of the same paternalism that the Court so roundly condemns.
 * On legal paternalism: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).

 * The tradition of having government-funded military schools for men is as well rooted in the traditions of this country as the tradition of sending only men into military combat. The people may decide to change the one tradition, like the other, through democratic processes; but the assertion that either tradition has been unconstitutional through the centuries is not law, but politics-smuggled-into-law.
 * On gender equality: United States v. Virginia (1996) (dissenting).

 * 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 must be living in another world. Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.
 * Board of County Commissioners, Wabaunsee County, Kansas, v. Umbehr, 518 U.S. 668, No. 94-1654 (1996, dissenting); decided June 28, 1996.

 * I respectfully, and indeed diffidently, dissent.
 * Saratoga Fishing Co. v. J. M. Martinac & Co., 520 U.S. 875 (1997) (dissenting).

 * Bork has essentially given up. I'm not ready to throw in the towel.
 * Asked about philosophical ally Robert Bork's urging that Congress override some Supreme Court rulings: Speech to the Anti-Defamation League (May 1997).

 * I'm not going to rip all that up. It's water over the dam. The people have gotten used to it. You know, that's what Stare Decisis is all about. In other words, I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.
 * On originalism vs. : Manhattan Institute Lecture (17 November 1997).

 * Textualism should not be confused with so-called strict constructionism, which is a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute. I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be--though better that, I suppose, than a nontextualist. A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.
 * Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 23 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). (PDF).

 * If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.
 * United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno, 526 U.S. 275 (1998) (Scalia, dissenting).

 * Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois [shock the middle classes]; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous to equate the denial of taxpayer subsidy with measures 'aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.'
 * On tax-funded art: National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) (concurring).

 * 'The operation was a success, but the patient died.' What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court's opinion in this case is to law.
 * National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 524 U.S. 569 (1998) (Scalia, concurring).

 * Legislative flexibility on the part of Congress will be the touchstone of federalism when the capacity to support combustion becomes the acid test of a fire extinguisher. Congressional flexibility is desirable, of course - but only within the bounds of federal power established by the Constitution. Beyond those bounds (the theory of our Constitution goes), it is a menace.
 * College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd., 527 U.S. 666 (1999).

2000s

 * In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the 'unalienable Rights' with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men . . . are endowed by their Creator.'
 * On parental rights: Troxel v. Granville (2000) (dissenting).

 * What today's decision will stand for, whether the Justices can bring themselves to say it or not, is the power of the Supreme Court to write a prophylactic, extraconstitutional Constitution, binding on Congress and the States.
 * Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428, 461 (2000) (dissenting).

 * The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, 'to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,' prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.
 * Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) (dissenting).

 * If one assumes, however, that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf—and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point—then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government's power [t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 3, to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a fundamental aspect of golf.
 * PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin, 532 U.S. 661 (2001) (dissenting).

 * I am left to defend the 'dead' Constitution.
 * On a living Constitution: Speech at Marquette University in Milwaukee (13 March 2001).

 * My difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one. I do not believe – and no one believed for 200 years – that the Constitution contains a right to abortion. And if a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would and could in good conscience vote against an attempt to invalidate that law, for the same reason that I vote against invalidation of laws that contradict Roe v. Wade; namely, simply because the Constitution gives the federal government and, hence, me no power over the matter.
 * Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty - Pew Forum conference at the University of Chicago (25 January 2002). N.b. this speech was later modified into an article - God's Justice and Ours which repeats much the same points.

 * Today's decision is the pinnacle of our Eighth Amendment death-is-different jurisprudence. Not only does it, like all of that jurisprudence, find no support in the text or history of the Eighth Amendment; it does not even have support in current social attitudes regarding the conditions that render an otherwise just death penalty inappropriate. Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members.
 * Atkins v. Virginia (2002) (dissenting).

 * Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment.
 * On campaign promises: Republican Party v. White, 536 U.S. 765 (2002) (majority opinion).

 * It seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: 'Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God'. For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence.
 * God’s Justice and Ours, 123 First Things 17. (May 2002). Adapted from remarks given at Pew Forum Conference on Religion, politics and death penalty.

 * Since [Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S.], I have acquired new wisdom ...or, to put it more critically, have discarded old ignorance
 * Admitting fallibility: Concurring in Ring v. Arizona 536 U.S. 584 (2002).

 * [Laws] prohibiting sodomy do not seem to have been enforced against consenting adults acting in private... I do not know what 'acting in private' means; surely consensual sodomy, like heterosexual intercourse, is rarely performed on stage.
 * On the right to sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (dissenting).

 * [The Texas anti-sodomy statute] undoubtedly imposes constraints on liberty. So do laws prohibiting prostitution, recreational use of heroin, and, for that matter, working more than 60 hours per week in a bakery. But there is no right to 'liberty' under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim. . . . The Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows States to deprive their citizens of 'liberty,' so long as 'due process of law' is provided. . ..
 * On the right to sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (dissenting).

 * If you care passionately about something has become the only test to determine if something is constitutional. How passionately do you care?
 * Speech at the University of Chicago Law School (6 May 2003).

 * People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
 * Speech at the University of Chicago Law School (6 May 2003).

 * You could fire a grapefruit out of a cannon over the best law schools in the country - and that includes Chicago - and not hit an originalist.
 * On modern teaching of law: Speech at University of Chicago Law School, (6 May 2003).

 * We Americans have a method for making the laws that are over us. We elect representatives to two Houses of Congress, each of which must enact the new law and present it for the approval of a President, whom we also elect. For over two decades now, unelected federal judges have been usurping this lawmaking power by converting what they regard as norms of international law into American law. Today's opinion approves that process in principle, though urging the lower courts to be more restrained. This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.
 * Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain et al., 542 U. S. 692 (2004) (concurring in part and concurring in judgment).

 * Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
 * On civil rights and the Global War on Terrorism: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) (dissenting).

 * Robert F. Kennedy used to say, 'Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?'; that outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law
 * Speech at Catholic University, Columbus School of Law (2004).

 * Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.
 * On the Confrontation Clause: Writing for the majority in Crawford v. Washington 541 U.S. 36 (2004).

 * Judges who find Constitutional rights the Framers never intended take important issues out of the public space of democratic debate and suspend them in a sort of legal formaldehyde.
 * Speech at University of Vermont, 8 October 2004

 * Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.
 * Address to the Knights of Columbus Council 969 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (January 2005).

 * On the point of the Court's Roper decision: I watched one television commentary on the case in which the host had one person defending the opinion on the ground that people should not be subjected to capital punishment for crimes they commit when they are younger than eighteen, and the other person attacked the opinion on the ground that a jury should be able to decide that a person, despite the fact he was under eighteen, given the crime, given the person involved, should be subjected to capital punishment. And it struck me how irrelevant it was, how much the point had been missed. The question wasn’t whether the call was right or wrong. The important question was who [i.e., the Courts or Congress] should make the call.
 * Speech at Woodrow Wilson Center (2005).

 * What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion - that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years—not, mind you, not that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed. The Court reaches this implausible result by purporting to advert, not to the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment, but to the evolving standards of decency, of our national society. It then finds, on the flimsiest of grounds, that a national consensus which could not be perceived in our people's laws barely 15 years ago now solidly exists.
 * On executing minors: Roper v. Simmons (2005) (dissenting).

 * The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards—and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent. Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a challenged practice, generally over a long period of time.
 * On executing minors: Roper v. Simmons (2005) (dissenting).

 * I think it is up to the judge to say what the Constitution provided, even if what it provided is not the best answer, even if you think it should be amended. If that's what it says, that's what it says.
 * Forum at American University (2005).

 * Now the Senate is looking for 'moderate' judges, 'mainstream' judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?
 * Address to Chapman University students (2005).

 * 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.
 * Speech at Chapman Law School (August 2005).

 * The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
 * Speech at the Juilliard School (22 September 2005).

 * I believe that our people’s traditional belief in the right of trial by jury is in perilous decline. That decline is bound to be confirmed, and indeed accelerated, by the repeated spectacle of a man’s going to his death because a judge found that an aggravating factor existed. We cannot preserve our veneration for the protection of the jury in criminal cases if we render ourselves callous to the need for that protection by regularly imposing the death penalty without it.
 * Ring v. Arizona (2006) (concurring).

 * Among the questions considered nonjusticiable is the definition of an impeachable offense. Whatever Congress says is an impeachable offense is an impeachable offense.
 * The definition of high crimes and misdemeanors: Speech at Berne, Switzerland (2006).

 * On Global Warming, in response to Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General James Milkey's correction of Scalia's reference to the stratosphere: Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.
 * Massachusetts vs. EPA, 05-1120 (30 November 2006).

 * I think too many promising young minds are wasted on it.
 * On college graduates considering law as a career: Address to the Claremont McKenna College Res Publica Society Luncheon (31 January 2007).

 * Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives, are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so."
 * Citing the television program 24 to support torture. The Globe and Mail

 * I don't think it's a living document, I think it's dead. More precisely, I think it's enduring. It doesn't change. I think that needs to be orthodoxy.
 * Speech at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia (April 2008). http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/04/no_to_cameras_yes_to_60_minute.html

 * As Justice Stevens explains, “ ‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.’ ” (quoting Atkins v. Virginia). “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress—who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment—is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.” The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.” It is Justice Stevens’ experience that reigns over all.
 * Baze v. Rees (2008) (concurring).

 * What if I am an aficionado of bullfights and I think, contrary to the animal cruelty people, that they ennoble both beast and man. I would not be able to market videos showing people how exciting a bullfight.
 * The Human Sacrifice Channel? Crush-Video Arguments Get Creative Wall Street Journal, (Oct, 2008).

Peter Eliasberg: Well, Justice Scalia, if I may go to your first point. The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew. [Laughter.] So it is the most common symbol to honor Christians. Antonin Scalia: '''I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion.'''
 * Antonin Scalia: It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. It's the — the cross is the — is the most common symbol of — of — of the resting place of the dead, and it doesn't seem to me — what would you have them erect? A cross — some conglomerate of a cross, a, and you know, a Moslem half moon and star?
 *  oral arguments, 7 October 2009, regarding the

2010s

 * Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box.
 * "The Originalist", California Lawyer (January 2011).

 * In the 1970's and 1980's vaccines became, one might say, victims of their own success. They had been so effective in preventing infectious diseases that the public became much less alarmed at the threat of those diseases, and much more concerned with the risk of injury from the vaccines themselves.
 * Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 562 U.S. 223 (2011), 226.

 * We are not talking here about a federal law prohibiting the States from regulating bubble-gum advertising, or even the construction of nuclear plants. We are talking about a federal law going to the core of state sovereignty: the power to exclude. […] The Court opinion’s looming specter of inutterable horror—‘[i]f [Section] 3 of the Arizona statute were valid, every State could give itself independent authority to prosecute federal registration violations’—seems to me not so horrible and even less looming. But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws? […] Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. […] Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.
 * Concurring in part and dissenting in part, Arizona v. United States (2012) : 567 U.S. ___ (2012); decided June 25, 2012.

 * If I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government.
 * New York Times (July 19, 2012)

 * The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a — in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was — in the Senate, there — it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term. Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don't think that's attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial .
 * Regarding :  oral arguments, (27 February 2013).

 * Today's judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver's license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.
 * Dissenting, Maryland v. King, 133 S. Ct. 1958, 1989, 186 L.Ed.2d 1 (2013).

 * I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion... That's a possible way to run a political system. The Europeans run it that way... And if the American people want to do it, I suppose they can enact that by statute. But to say that's what the Constitution requires is utterly absurd.
 * Speech at Colorado Christian University, quoted in Valerie Richardson, "Scalia defends keeping God, religion in public square", The Washington Times.

 * [N]ot once in the history of the American Republic has this Court ever suggested the death penalty is categorically impermissible. The reason is obvious:  It is impossible to hold unconstitutional that which the Constitution explicitly contemplates.  The Fifth Amendment provides that "[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital . . . crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury," and that no person shall be "deprived of life . . . without due process of law."
 * Concurring, Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. ___ (2015).

 * You're looking at me as though I'm weird. My god! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the devil! It's in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the devil! Most of mankind has believed in the devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the devil.

 * The Court's opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.
 * Navarette v. California, 134 S. Ct. 1683, 1697, 188 L. Ed. 2d 680 (2014).

 * Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.
 * Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart graduation commencement speech,.

 * Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.
 * Dissenting, King v, Burwell, 576 U.S. ___ (2015); decided June 25, 2015.

 * It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court's claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
 * Dissenting, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015); decided June 26, 2015.

 * A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
 * Dissenting, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015); decided June 26, 2015.

 * If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
 * Dissenting (footnote #22), Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015); decided June 26, 2015.

 * To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from? To be sure, you can't favor one denomination over another but can't favor religion over non-religion?
 * God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways.
 * Archbishop Rummel High School, Metairie, Louisiana,.

 * Winning and losing, that's never been my objective. It's my hope that in the fullness of time, the majority of the court will is come to see things as I do.
 * NPR interview with Nina Totenberg; as cited in Scalia: A Court of One, Bruce Allen Murphy, Simon & Schuster (2014), p. 374

Misattributed

 * The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger.... The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific "fact," since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or "guess."... It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a "myth."
 * , 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (dissenting)
 * Has been misleadingly quoted without Scalia's statements attributing the assertions to witness testimony paragraphs earlier, "Before summarizing the testimony of Senator Keith and his supporters, I wish to make clear that I by no means intend to endorse its accuracy... Senator Keith and his witnesses testified essentially as set forth in the following numbered paragraphs:", as in Michael Stone, "Scalia Commencement Speech Supports Young Earth Creationism", Progressive Secular Humanist, Patheos.

 * Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
 * These words, which have been widely attributed to Scalia, do not appear in any of his writings or statements. He nonetheless remarked in Herrera v. Collins (1993, concurring) that state courts had no obligation to review a death sentence on factual innocence grounds, an opinion that he repeated in In re Davis (2009, dissenting).

Quotes about Scalia

 * He was a towering figure who will be remembered as one of the most important figures in the history of the Supreme Court and a scholar who deeply influenced our legal culture. His intellect, learning, wit, and memorable writing will be sorely missed.
 * Samuel Alito, Associate Supreme Court Justice, in Supreme Court Justices weigh in on Antonin Scalia’s death, USA Today (15 February 2016).

 * Justice Scalia, do you sodomize your wife?
 * Law student Eric Berndt, to Scalia, at a 2005 public question-and-answer session, after Scalia defended his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas on the grounds of state interest in personal sexual morality.

 * Scalia will be remembered chiefly for moving the conversation about statutory interpretation—in the direction of textualism—and constitutional interpretation—toward originalism. I have almost always found myself on the other side of these debates, but I nonetheless appreciate the magnitude of his influence. He redefined both fields.
 * Michael Dorf, American liberal law professor, in "A Personal Remembrance of Justice Scalia" (13 February 2016), Dorf on Law.

 * He was a jurist of captivating brilliance and wit, with a rare talent to make even the most sober judge laugh. The press referred to his ‘energetic fervor,’ ‘astringent intellect,’ ‘peppery prose,’ ‘acumen,’ and ‘affability,’ all apt descriptions. He was eminently quotable, his pungent opinions so clearly stated that his words never slipped from the reader’s grasp. […] It was my great good fortune to have known him as working colleague and treasured friend.
 * Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Supreme Court Justice, in Ruth Bader Ginsburg Remembers Antonin Scalia, Her Dear Friend and Sparring Partner, Huffpost Politics, at huffingtonpost.com (14 February 2016).

 * Scalia was one of the most concerned members of the court about criminalizing politics and the line between what's allowed and what's not allowed. I think his voice would have been a very important one in the McDonnell case.
 * Rick Hasen, a law professor the University of California at Irvine, as quoted in "Scalia's death could doom McDonnell and hurt Melendez" on Politico (16 February 2016).

 * In January 2002, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia made a major speech so sweeping and extreme in its contempt for democracy, and so willfully oblivious to the Constitution’s grounding in human rather than divine authority, that it might well, in an era when American secularists were less intimidated by the forces of religion, have elicited calls for impeachment.
 * Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers (2004), Chapter 12, “Reason Embattled” (p. 348 in the trade paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-8050-7776-6)

 * Scalia is right to observe that what a person believes happens after death determines his view of it-and therefore, his ethics. It is remarkable that we are the last civilized nation that still puts 'evildoers' to death, and Justice Scalia rightly attributes this to our style of religiosity...Scalia supports the use of capital punishment even in cases where the defendant is acknowledged to be mentally retarded. He also upholds state sodomy laws (in this case, even when they are applied in an exclusive and discriminating way to homosexuals.) Needless to say, Scalia has found legal reasons to insist that the Supreme Court not leaven the religious dogmatism of the states, but he leaves little doubt that he looks to Saint Paul, and perhaps to the barbarous authors of Leviticus for guidance on these matters.
 * Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004), Chapter 5, "West of Eden" (p. 157-158 in the trade paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-393-32765-6)

 * Scalia will go down in history as one of the most transformational Supreme Court Justices of our nation. His views on interpreting texts have changed the way all of us think and talk about the law. I admired Nino for his brilliance and erudition, his dedication and energy, and his peerless writing. And I treasured Nino’s friendship. I will always remember, and greatly miss, his warmth, charm, and generosity.
 * Elena Kagan, Associate Supreme Court Justice, in Supreme Court Justices weigh in on Antonin Scalia’s death, USA Today (15 February 2016).

 * In years to come any history of the Supreme Court will, and must, recount the wisdom, scholarship, and technical brilliance that Justice Scalia brought to the Court. His insistence on demanding standards shaped the work of the Court in its private discussions, its oral arguments, and its written opinions.
 * Anthony Kennedy, Associate Supreme Court Justice, in Supreme Court Justices weigh in on Antonin Scalia’s death, USA Today (15 February 2016).

 * the people's right to have their day in court is being foreclosed. Corporate victories in federal and state elections work hand in hand with this mission by assuring the nomination of more commercially-responsive judges such as Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia and Alito, with the same being true in many states.
 * Ralph Nader, Breaking Through Power (2016)

 * I am saddened to report that our colleague Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away. He was an extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by his colleagues. His passing is a great loss to the Court and the country he so loyally served.
 * John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States, in Supreme Court Justices weigh in on Antonin Scalia’s death, USA Today (15 February 2016).

 * Richard Epstein's book, Takings: Private Property and the Power of the Eminent Domain, is the bible of the "ownership society" of the cowboy capitalists of the 21st century. It is also the bible of judges like Clarence Thomas and Antonio Scalia who have used Epstein's philosophy of takings to undo the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and alter laws based on the public trust doctrine.
 * Vandana Shiva Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005)

 * [E]ven now, I'm confident Scalia's anti-gay beliefs will remain as a lasting blotch on his memory. But in a few decades—when a majority of Americans can't remember a time when the Constitution did not guarantee gay people the same fundamental rights as heterosexuals—the sting of this rhetoric will dwindle. Scalia, after all, was writing in dissent; his words had little impact on the country. […] Memories of his regrettable prejudices will recede, and in their place will emerge the image of a titan of constitutional law, a deeply principled, sincerely dedicated man who devoted his life to the court he loved.
 * Mark Joseph Stern, writer for Slate on law and LGBTQ issues; from Antonin Scalia Will Be Remembered As One of the Greats on slate.com (February 13, 2011).

title: Antonin Scalia


text:
William Rehnquist

William Hubbs Rehnquist (October 1, 1924 – September 3, 2005) was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States for 33 years, as an associate justice from 1972 to 1986 and as Chief Justice from 1986 until his death in 2005. Considered a conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Under this view of federalism, the court, for the first time since the 1930s, struck down an act of Congress as exceeding its power under the Commerce Clause.

Quotes

 * [I]f...a society adopts a constitution and incorporates in that constitution safeguards of individual liberty, these safeguards do indeed take on a general moral rightness or goodness. They assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by the people.
 * The Notion of a Living Constitution.
 * It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as [giving blacks, Latinos and Jews the right to be served in local motels, hotels and restaurants].
 * Letter to the Phoenix, Arizona city council, as cited in The Rehnquist Court : Bill Rehnquist Was Once Considered An Extremist. Now His Views Almost Always Become The Law Of The Land., by David G. Savage, in the LA Times, September 29 1991

Judicial opinions

 * Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability.
 * General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125 (1976) (majority opinion); the ruling allowed GE's employee disability insurance plan to exclude conditions arising from pregnancy.

 * This result […] will daily stand as a veritable sword of Damocles over every succeeding president and his advisers.
 * Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977) (dissent); the court ruled 7–2 that Congress could seize Richard Nixon’s presidential papers.

 * The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engage in gestures of superficial equality.
 * Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U.S. 57 at 80 (1981) (majority opinion); this ruling upheld a military draft for males only.

 * No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The "wall of separation between church and State" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
 * Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985) (dissenting opinion).

 * The considered professional judgment of the Air Force is that the traditional outfitting of personnel in standardized uniforms encourages the subordination of personal preferences and identities in favor of the overall group mission.
 * Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. 503 (1986) (majority opinion); the ruling upheld the military's prohibition of a Jewish officer from wearing a yarmulke indoors while in uniform.

 * [Jury selection] is best based upon seat-of-the-pants instincts, which are undoubtedly crudely stereotypical and may in many cases be hopelessly mistaken.
 * Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986) (dissenting opinion).

 * At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions. The First Amendment recognizes no such thing as a "false" idea.
 * Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988).

 * A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak.
 * United States v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (2003) (plurality opinion); the case concerned whether Congress could require libraries receiving Federal subsidies for Internet connectivity to install filtering software.

 * [T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment.
 * ibid.

 * To the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance.
 * ibid.

 * It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people in the South don't like the colored people; the Constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action, but it most assuredly did not appoint the Court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head. To the extent that this decision advances the frontier of state action and 'social gain,' it pushes back the frontier of freedom of association and majority rule.
 * Memo written to in response to the Supreme Court's 1953 decision to address the case of, as cited in "The Partisan", in the New York Times, March 3, 1985

Books, articles, and speeches

 * 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.
 * Address at the University of Minnesota Law School; quoted in The New York Times (20 October 1984).

 * Somewhere "out there," beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.
 * Address at Suffolk University Law School; quoted in The New York Times (17 April 1986).

 * An oft-heard description of the Supreme Court is that it is the ultimate protector in our society of the liberties of the individual. This phrase describes an important role of the Supreme Court, but by ignoring other equally important functions of the Court, it has a potential for mischief. It is a fairly short leap from this language to a feeling that the US Constitution is somehow "vindicated" every time a claim of individual right against government is upheld, and is not vindicated whenever such a claim is not upheld. But this, of course, cannot be the case. The role of the Supreme Court is to uphold those claims of individual liberty that it finds are well-founded in the Constitution, and to reject other claims against the government that it concludes are not well-founded. Its role is no more to exclusively uphold the claims of the individual than it is to exclusively uphold the claims of the government: It must hold the constitutional balance true between these claims.
 * The Supreme Court: How it Was, How it Is (1987).

 * When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time.
 * Quoted in Time magazine (13 June 1988).

 * I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes.
 * 1997 speech at University of Virginia Law School, as quoted in Marc Galanter, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (2006), p. 3.

 * Actually, the Swedish genealogists were so good that I found out more than I wanted to about my Swedish ancestors: one of them in the 17th century was executed for having embezzled funds from an estate for which he was the steward.
 * Address at a Swedish Colonial Society luncheon in Philadelphia (9 April 2001).

 * As for the name Rehnquist, I am quite uncertain as to its origin. Under the Swedish patronymic system of naming, my grandfather and his brothers would have been named Anderson, since Anders was the name of their father. "Quist" in Swedish means branch, I am told. For example, "Lindquist" means lime branch or linden branch, and Palmquist means palm branch. The best I can come up with is that the "rehn" in my name refers to a small village near the farm on which my grandfather grew up.
 * Address at a Swedish Colonial Society luncheon in Philadelphia (9 April 2001).

 * It has been said that Sweden's loss has been America's gain, and I think this is true. Swedish immigrants and their descendants have contributed a great deal to America and it is worthwhile to remember our Swedish heritage.
 * Address at a Swedish Colonial Society luncheon in Philadelphia (9 April 2001).

 * A judge who is a 'strict constructionist' in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs—the latter two groups having been the principal beneficiaries of the Supreme Court's 'broad constructionist' reading of the Constitution.
 * As quoted in The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court (2001) by John Dean; quoted in an article at Slate.

 * Inadequate compensation seriously compromises the judicial independence fostered by life tenure. That low salaries might force judges to return to the private sector rather than stay on the bench risks affecting judicial performance. . . Every time an experienced judge leaves the bench, the nation suffers temporary loss in judicial productivity. Diminishing judicial salaries affects not only those who have become judges but also the pool of those willing to be considered for a position on the federal bench.
 * Statement before the National Commission on Public Service, July 15, 2002.

 * Our judges will not continue to represent the diverse face of America if only the well-to-do or the mediocre are willing to become judges.
 * ibid.

 * The framers of our Constitution came up with two major contributions to the art of government. The first was the idea of an executive not dependent on the political support of the legislature. The second was the idea of the judiciary independent of the executive and legislative branches.
 * ibid.

 * I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement... I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits.
 * Written statement reacting to speculation that he might retire from the US Supreme Court after Sandra Day O'Connor declared that she would. (July 2005).

 * Well, I think it's a very good job. One of the most appealing things about it is that... it enables you to participate in some way and to some extent in the way the country is governed but you're able to maintain a private life as well.
 * As quoted in BBC article on his death. (4 September 2005).

Booknotes television interview (July 5, 1992)

 * I think Alexander Hamilton has received a little bit of short shrift from history, and I think Jefferson has been treated a little bit too generously. I admire them both, but I admire them both about equally.

 * If you could say of any one individual that the court as an institution is the length and shadow of that individual, surely it would be John Marshall.

 * Perhaps you should say there should be mandatory retirement even of members of the court, members of the federal judiciary. I'm sure there can be questions about whether one does as good work when you get into your—you know, I'm 67.

 * The court has built a great deal of prestige, and I think is generally quite well thought of as a public institution in the country. It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated. In that sense, it poses a danger, but not the same sort of perhaps very active danger that a run-away Congress or runaway executive would.

 * Well, it's just a sense of personal satisfaction. Just like taking a good photograph or painting a picture or playing a good golf game or something, it's the thing in itself that justifies it.
 * On writing.

Quotes about Rehnquist

 * [Rehnquist] was funny and charming, very bright and quick. He could give you all the good conservative arguments on any issue. He had no sympathy for criminal defendants — none. When you talked about the problem of the cities or the poor or blacks, it was clear he had no understanding. It was a universe he didn't comprehend.
 * Former Supreme Court law clerk Donald Trautman, as cited in The Rehnquist Court : Bill Rehnquist Was Once Considered An Extremist. Now His Views Almost Always Become The Law Of The Land., by David G. Savage, in the LA Times, September 29 1991

 * All nine of the justices on the Court at that time - Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer - were extremely intelligent. But even in that room Rehnquist stood out. He had been first in his class at Stanford Law and he had a photographic memory, unlike any I'd ever encountered. My first impression of him proved right. He really didn't need law clerks. He was so damned smart. Most of the justices had law clerks prepare long bench memos on cases. Rehnquist didn't need that. He just wanted three-page summaries of the facts. He knew all the rest already.
 * Ted Cruz in A Time for Truth.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: William Rehnquist


text:
Talk:X2

It seems that 2 different editors have been changing the category for this page back and forth between Films and Comic book films. This kind of thing is the reason I think we need a standard policy for genre films (list only in genre category, or both there & in films?) --RPickman 17:01, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

for stryker, shouldnt it be "I used to think you were one of a kind--I was wrong" not "I used to think I was one of a kind"172.197.233.219 07:48, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

The orginal title of this article, X-Men 2, was changed to the proper title of the film, X2 (film) Master son 18:52, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

This file lacks proper Wikiquote formatting and requires cleanup. Added Film-Cleanup tag Master son 19:24, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

title: Talk:X2