“An important function of the Supreme Court is to provide guidance, As a lower court judge, I appreciate clear guidance from the Supreme Court.”

Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on.

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures – joined with the similar failures of others – can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

If it’s a situation in which the public is being given access, you can’t discriminate against the media and say, as a general matter, that the media don’t have access, because their access rights, of course, correspond with those of the public.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them.

The States are separate and independent sovereigns. Sometimes they need to act like it.

People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society.

You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same sex-marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you? As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax.

You can’t fight for your rights if you don’t know what they are.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

I find that when I tell lawyer jokes to a mixed audience, the lawyers don’t think they’re funny and the non-lawyers don’t think they’re jokes.

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax.

By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it’s at a party or it’s in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge.