Quotes about Constitutional Context

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

John Ashcroft

This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.

Anthony Kennedy

A commitment to the Constitution is not something that's genetic. It's not inherited. It's not automatic. It has to be taught. And each generation must learn about the Constitution and the values of constitutional institutions within the context of their own time, within the environment of their own time.

David Souter

There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.

Al Franken

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.

Thomas Reid

There is no such thing as suicide in any provision of the Constitution.

The Constitution sets the majority of each house as a quorum in order to conduct any business. Minorities, in order to obstruct proceedings, would often refuse to answer their names when a quorum call would made even though they were present in the House, Therefore they claimed they could not be counted towards a quorum. In those days there were always absences due to illness, transportation, family emergencies and the like. So the majority had to have most of its members on the floor at all times if the minority wanted too obstruct. The minority claimed it was their right under the Constitution, Reed said that interpreting the Constitution that way was tantamount to suicide for the House. He then changed the rule, and simply counted as present any member who was observed to be present, whether he answered a quorum call or not.

Indonesia

We cannot understand the constitution of any country whatsoever by reading the text alone. To gain a thorough understanding of such constitution we have to know how the text came into existence, the conditions that prevailed at the time. In this way we can grasp the fundamental ideas and the basic reasoning underlying the constitution.

Samuel Freeman Miller

The construction of the language of the Constitution ... as indeed in all other instances where construction becomes necessary, we are to place ourselves as nearly as possible in the condition of the men who framed that instrument.

Constitutional Context Quotes