“[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.”

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

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.

Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.

It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State”.

The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

The 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.’

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt.

Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

The Second Amendment is outdated in the sense that its function has become obsolete.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

We simply cannot re-elect a president who does not believe in the rule of law and our constitution.

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.

The transfer of power is always a test of the constitutional system, a test of its strength.