“The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.”

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.

[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.

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.

The court’s job is to uphold the Constitution and you don’t call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?

A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?

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.

Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?

The only real lawyers are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers try cases to juries.

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work; it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing – nothing at all or in any way – be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

The liberty to make our laws does not give us the freedom nor the license to break our laws!

The law is a battery, which protects all that is behind it, but sweeps with destruction all that is outside.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

The Old Testament gave us the law; the New Testament reveals the love upon which the law rests.

We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.