Byron White Quotes

That law is constitutional, and the Constitution authorizes nothing repugnant to the Divine law.

Statutes against Fundamental Morality are void

You watch the Supreme Court in action on these cases, and they are a conflicted court. However, when it comes to speech issues generally, the court has been protective.

It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to 'discover' a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.

The death of chief justice Rehnquist and the president's nomination of John Roberts raises the stakes for the court and the American people exponentially.

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.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.

Does the Constitution permit the execution of an innocent person?

A first principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence is that the ends do not justify the means.

We are charged with being a menace to the United States, with being inimical to the Constitution and Government, simply because we have undertaken to legitimately and legally test in the courts, as we have the most perfect right to do, the legality and constitutionality of the law and the commissioners' rulings

Stare decisis is usually the wise policy, because in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right. ... But in cases involving the Federal Constitution, where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions. ... This is strikingly true of cases under the due process clause.

The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly

Mob rule can not be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

What many people, I think, don't really understand is how much their rights really turn on the interpretation of the Supreme Court.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.

Whatever your partisan affiliation, it is worth considering the overarching constitutional principles involved in any given Supreme Court precedent.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

I think, clearly, where you have a situation in which the Solicitor General tells me, 'I cannot in good faith argue a certainly legal position,' and if the president told us to argue that position, we would have to tell him, 'No, we can't do that, Mr. President.'

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?

I'm an American. I have constitutional rights.

I never want to be in the business of predicting what the U.S. Supreme Court will do.

Courts are supposed to interpret laws to avoid 'absurd results' and to avoid constitutional problems - such as infringing on the free speech rights of Americans.

We all need good laws, and an independent, impartial, and efficient judiciary to verify the constitutionality of those laws.

The House Judiciary Committee is a great place to promote our core principles of constitutionally limited government, individual freedom and the rule of law.

When you're allowing the Executive Branch to deprive somebody of a constitutional liberty without any process, that is something that affects all Americans because that's a precedent that can be used.