"[M]ost of us would readily concede that the framers of the 1787 Constitution adopted a federal system of government organization in order to, among other goals, help secure the institution of private property. When Madison, in his theory of faction, suggested that shifting the legislative responsibility for certain problems from the state to the national level could help assure that majorities would not trample on minority rights, the problems he had in mind were largely economic; the minority rights... were, for the most part, rights of property and contract."

"[T]he question of whethor a particular amendment has... been lawfully ratified... would matter mightily with amendments as the three passed in the wake of the Civil War—the Thirteenth (abolishing slavery), the Fourteenth (defining citizenship and guaranteeing certain basic human rights to all persons in their dealings even with their own states), and the Fifteenth (abolishing racial qualifications for voting)—whose ratification by the legislatures of the former Confederate states was not exactly voluntary. Their acquiescence was secured by force, having been made a condition for their reentry into the Union from which they had attempted to secede."

"The visible Constitution... certainly doesn't answer very many of the persistent questions about what it means in any particular case and at any particular time. Indeed, the Constitution even tells us that it doesn't tell us: The Ninth Amemdment... expressly says, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny of disparage others retained by the people." In plain English there's more than meets the eye."

"[M]any constitutional scholars, political and moral philosophers, and social and political historians have described over the generations... the "unwritten Constitution," the subject of a classic study by William Bennett Munro published in 1930... "The Makers of the Unwritten Constitution,"... built on a still earlier and highly influential 1890 work by Professor Christopher G. Tiedeman... "The Unwritten Constitution of the United States." ...[S]cholarly work ...lay largely forgotten until ...resurrected in the writing of ...scholars in the 1970s. The focus... responses to the supposedly problematic legitimacy of having unelected and politically unaccountable judges resort to unenacted norms of this "unwritten Constitution" when holding duly promulgated laws and executive actions "unconstitutional.""

"My interest is less in what's invisible "around" the Constitution than in what is invisible within it."

"I mean to set aside... the complex superstructure of rules, doctrines, standards, legal tests, judicial precedents, legislative and executive practices, and the cultural and social traditions that together constitute what people call "constitutional law.""

"[W]hy do thoughtful judges and scholars continue to put forth the process-perfecting theories as though such theories could banish divisive controversies over substantive values from the realm of constitutional discourse by relegating those controversies to the unruly world of power?"

"[I]t is largely because I find all exercises of power by some over others—even with what passes for the latter's consent—are and must remain deeply problematic, that I find all legitimating theories not simply amusing in their pretensions but... as dangerous as they are convincing."

"I am... moved... by a sense of the ultimate futility of the quest for an Archimedean point outside ourselves from which the legitimacy of some form of judicial review or constitutional exegesis may be affirmed."

"No one... persuaded that the categories of constitutional discourse, or of law generally, are readily rendered determinate and certain—and no one who believes that those categories are inherently empty, infinitely malleable, and ultimately corrupt—need read any further."

"[J]ust as I am not writing for those who feel confident that canons of appropriate constitutional construction may be convincingly derived from some neutral source, so I am also not writing for those who have convinced themselves that "anything goes" as long as it helps end what they see as injustice; that constitutional law is only a legitimating mask for what those in power can get away with; or that it is only a tame language in which those that would otherwise foment violent revolution can couch their demands in forms the regime might accept without losing face."

"[A]lthough the effort was finally rejected by the Senate, the House was sufficiently persuaded by James Madison's fear of state and local oppression... to approve a constitutional amendment... that "no State shall infringe the equal rights of conscience, nor the freedom of speech or of the press, nor of the right of trial by jury in criminal cases." ...[H]e came close to succeeding in 1789, and... it took a Civil War to make the difference."

"[A] Bill of Rights directed against federal abuses was thought necessary in addition to the separation and division of powers..."

"If the legislature would punish, it must enlist... the other branches—the executive to prosecute, the judicial to try and convict."

"In the first model, the centralized accumulation of power in any man or single group... meant tyranny; the division and separation of powers, both vertically (...federal, state and local...) and horizontally (...legislative, executive, and judicial...) meant liberty."

"No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure."

"The structure of a fully articulated profession is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made."

"We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them."

"Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere."

"Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I'm doing it."

"Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can only choose to employ it in one way rather than another."

"What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment."

"Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors."

"People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved."

"Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items."

"Fish has raised careerism to a worldview. In this way, he is a man for our time."

"Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?"

"The idea — the core idea of humanism — is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,.."

"They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence."

"The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows."

"The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable."

"Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction."

"It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales."