Legal Text Quotes

The choice of "fundamental values" by the [Supreme] Court cannot be justified. Where constitutional materials do not clearly specify the value to be preferred, there is no principled way to prefer any claimed human value to any other. The judge must stick close to the text and history, and their fair implications, and not construct any new rights.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

The framers of the constitution employed words in their natural sense; and, where they are plain and clear, resort to collateral aids to interpretation is unnecessary, and cannot be indulged in to narrow or enlarge the text; but where there is ambiguity or doubt, or where two views may well be entertained, contemporaneous and subsequent practical construction is entitled to the greatest weight.

We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.

The greatest defect in legislative history is its illegitimacy. We are governed not by legislative intention but by laws… the text should control even if the Congress intended a different result

All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself

I think people are great in many different ways. So, I think some justices are great because they have extraordinary wisdom, they have an understanding of how to apply the law in their times in a way that's completely consistent with the text of the law and the purposes of the law, and in a way that's completely right for the times in which they live in.

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.

Values that I would be enforcing if I were a judge are not just my values, that I am not striking something down simply because I don't like it. That is a countermajoritarian aspect of our system of government. I would start with the text.