Lawyers From The United States

"My job is to faithfully interpret the work of the Legislature and to try and communicate to our judgments as clearly as possible, I never signed on for the job of philosopher king, If I thought I was any good at crafting policy, I would be in a different branch of government."

"Honestly, I love this job — that’s not even some talking point. I love this job, and I want to keep this job. My kids are in school here in Michigan, and my family is here in Michigan."

"The solution to climate change is not this un-serious resolution that we’re considering this week in the Senate, but rather the serious business of human flourishing. The solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places, is to fall in love, get married and have some kids."

"Mike Lee has been an opponent of LGBTQ equality."

"I am proud of what I have accomplished, especially while serving as chief justice, at the time I joined the court, it was marked by acrimony. When I became chief justice, we proved that good people who may differ in their opinions can come together and accomplish important things for the people we serve – and we do it amicably."

"I diligently self-censor and aim for carefulness,” Willett told me, “A few cardinal rules: I don’t throw partisan sharp elbows or discuss pending cases. I keep things light and upbeat. Whether you’re crafting a 140-page opinion or a 140-character tweet, judges must always be judicious."

"Judges should always behave judicially by adjudicating, never politically by legislating. I leave policy to policymakers. They’re preeminent, but they’re not omnipotent. In other words, lawmakers decide if laws pass, but judges decide if laws pass muster. There’s a fateful difference between activist judges who concoct rights and active judges who dutifully protect the rights our Framers actually enshrined."

"Our Constitution exists to secure individual freedom, the essential condition of human flourishing. Liberty is not provided by government; liberty preexists government. It’s our natural birthright, not a gift from the sovereign. Our founders upended things and divided power to enshrine a promise, not a process."

"Mike Lee is bad for public education."

"Mike Lee has not helped fight gun violence."

"Justice Antonin Scalia fundamentally changed the way the Supreme Court interpreted both statutes and the Constitution. In both contexts, his focus on text and its original public meaning often translated into more limited criminal prohibitions and broader constitutional protections for defendants. ‎As to statutes, Justice Scalia refocused the court’s attention on the text of the laws Congress enacted. Although he may not have succeeded in getting the court to forswear even looking at legislative history, he did persuade his colleagues to start — and very often end — the analysis with the text. In the criminal context, he limited terms like extortion and property to their common law core and found the residual clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act as unconstitutionally vague as “the phrase ‘fire-engine red, light pink, maroon, navy blue, or colors that otherwise involve shades of red.” When it came to interpreting the Constitution, he likewise put the text first and emphasized that the terms must be understood in light of their original public meaning. He believed that the words should be understood the way the framers used them. This did not mean that constitutional protections were frozen in time."

"I don’t particularly like the term "States' rights." I can’t say I’ve totally avoided it in my political career. But much more often than not, I refer to federalism. I believe in a balance of Federal and State power. I’ve expressed that perspective on a number of my writings and speeches."

"I have said that this Nation as founded on a Christian perspective of the nature of man, that we derive our rights from God and not from government. And part of that perspective is that every individual enjoys human rights without regard to what the majority wants. Every individual enjoys human rights, like religious freedom and freedom of conscience, including the freedom not to worship. That is what I have said. That’s what I believe in. That goes to the core of what I believe in. It is, I believe, the perspective of the American form of government, and I have been faithful in my record as Attorney General in defending the Constitution when it comes to issues like religious freedom."

"The judiciary has a profound and humble, but vitally important role in interpreting the law and following the law, and putting aside personal beliefs and ensuring that the law has been faithfully executed, according to the real lawmaker, which is the legislature, or in the event of an interpretation of our highest law, the Constitution, by virtue of the people themselves."

"I considered Roe to be the abomination because it involves abortion, involves, from my perspective, the killing of innocent, unborn children."

"Dr. Blasey is not a lone accuser. Since her account was first published by The Washington Post on Sept. 16, considerable corroborating evidence has emerged, but none of it will be properly examined at Thursday’s hearing. Besides Julie Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez has accused Judge Kavanaugh of exposing himself and touching her while they were both students at Yale. This week four people who know Dr. Blasey, including her husband, signed affidavits and submitted them to the Judiciary Committee saying she told them about being sexually assaulted by Judge Kavanaugh before he was nominated by President Trump. Their statements provide important corroboration, and if the Senate was really interested in learning the truth, these people would be called to testify."

"[On the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings following his nomination as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.] Kavanaugh’s testimony, by contrast, was hideous to watch. He lurched between tears and anger, and lied repeatedly about his youthful drinking habits, prompting other classmates to contradict his claims. He appears to have lied about the meaning of vulgar in-jokes in his yearbook (a "devil’s triangle", he said, was a drinking game, rather than the accepted definition of a threesome involving two men and a woman). He was partisan and conspiratorial, blaming "the Clintons". The Republican Party successfully framed the hearings as a trial where the highest standard of proof should be demanded, rather than a job interview to find the best candidate. (At no point does anyone seriously seem to have made the argument that Kavanaugh is America’s finest available legal brain.) Nonetheless, I felt uneasy watching him sob and sniffle; it reminded me of the way in which rape complainants feel their characters are picked apart for credibility. A man can be an entitled, drunken, obnoxious misogynist and still not be a rapist. All the hearings proved to me is that hyperpartisan political spaces are no place to ascertain the truth about sexual assault."

"Survivors, I believe you. Because I am you. #BelieveSurivors #StopKavanaugh #timesup ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽"

"Most proponents of a mandatory retirement age or term limits claim that we should amend the Constitution in order to alleviate the problems associated with life tenure. Their proposals implicitly reject an incentives approach to retirement because they assume that Justices will not act rationally in response to institutional modifications. In other words, both proposals are not only radical in their scope and represent substantial constitutional change, but they also rely on the remarkable proposition that Justices are fundamentally different from the rest of us in the way they approach economic decisions. There is little evidence to commend this view, and there is considerable empirical research to the contrary that supports Judge Posner’s thesis that Justices maximize the same thing everybody else does: their own utility.11 Put simply, legal scholars have not thought creatively about life tenure, shunning promising interdisciplinary approaches in favor of drastic constitutional change."

"Yes, we drank beer, my friends and I, boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer, still like beer. We drank beer. The drinking age, as I noted, so the seniors were legal. Senior year in high school, people were legal to drink. And we—yes, we drank beer. And I said sometimes—sometimes probably had too many beers, and sometimes other people had too many beers. We drank beer. We liked beer."

"Gay and lesbian Americans cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth."

"People sometimes ask what prior legal experience has been most useful for me as a judge. And I say, “I certainly draw on all of them,” but I also say that my five-and-a-half years at the White House and especially my three years as staff secretary for President George W. Bush were the most interesting and informative for me."

"Kavanaugh's nomination was well-received on campus. "Certainly it’s a feather in their cap," Kevin Dowd, Kavanaugh's high school basketball coach, told The New York Times. "I just hope they don’t get carried away and raise tuition.""

"The Founders also recognized, I think necessarily and certainly at the time, that people with Government service who had served in the legislative branch or served in the executive branch would become judges--Chief Justice Marshall, for example--would have backgrounds that involved Government service or political service. But they also had confidence in the ability of people in our system, once they became judges and put on the black robes, to decide cases fairly and impartially. And that's the way that system has worked for more than two centuries. And I know there has been some discussion about that, but that's the way the system has worked in terms of deciding cases fairly and impartially and not based on political of personal views."

"There is one kind of judge. There is an independent judge under our Constitution. And the fact that they may have been a Republican or Democrat or an independent in a past life is completely irrelevant to how they conduct themselves as judges. And I think two centuries of experience has shown us that that ideal which the Founders established can be realized and has been realized and will continue to be realized."

"There is a reason Thursday’s Senate Committee hearing will be short and feature only two witnesses, the Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford. Republicans have designed the hearing to end in a "he said, she said" stalemate. No matter how credible Dr. Blasey is, isolating her as a lone accuser is the most effective political strategy for confirming Judge Kavanaugh."

"The proponents of a mandatory retirement age and term limits have underestimated the degree to which the rational actor model applies to Justices. In making many decisions, as the empirical evidence demonstrates, Justices attempt to maximize their own preferences, whether based on policy considerations or other factors. The retirement decision is no exception. Scholars who dispute the applicability of the rational actor model to Justices have either not focused on the persuasive empirical evidence advanced by political scientists or have failed to consider all of the variables that touch upon judicial utility."

"I have no hesitation in applying a law regardless of what I might think about it; I think any good judge recognizes his or her place in our constitutional government, and that place is not to upset the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. So, I do not have any compunction about following the law as written by Congress."

"Quite honestly, we get one new civil case every business day of the year. We spend so much of our time reading the law and interpreting the law, that that does not leave much time for consideration of whether the law is prudent or might be written in a better way. I spend all of my time, with the assistance of my law clerks, trying to read the law and interpret it and apply it to the facts presented in any particular case. So I cannot say that I have spent much time at all considering the propriety of the laws that I have had occasion to interpret."

"It has helped me keep in mind all times that not all lawyers always work in the best interests of their clients. It is a very delicate situation. If a lawyer does not appear to the judge to be working in the best interest of the clients, I think the way to deal with that is to have hearings on the record and hope that the parties might appear.Sometimes from the bench, or sometimes in a conference on the record, the court is in a position to give guidance that not only is for the ears of the attorney, but may also be for the ears of the litigant, him or herself."

"If the Trump campaign, or anybody associated with it, aided or abetted the Russians, it would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history."

"The stakes are nothing less than the future of liberal democracy. We are engaged in a new war of ideas, not communism versus capitalism, but authoritarianism versus democracy and representative government."

"What is striking here is the degree to which the Russians were willing to undertake such an audacious and risky action against the most powerful nation on earth. That ought to be a warning to us, that if we thought that the Russians would not dare to so blatantly interfere in our affairs, we were wrong. And if we do not do our very best to understand how the Russians accomplished this unprecedented attack on our democracy and what we need to do to protect ourselves in the future, we will have only ourselves to blame."

"Unlike those people climbing outside the building, they knew it was a lie. The true believers were out there attacking the building. But inside the chamber, my Republican colleagues know it is a big lie"

"That foreign adversary was, of course, Russia, and it acted through its intelligence agencies and upon the direct instructions of its autocratic ruler, Vladimir Putin, in order to help Donald J. Trump become the 45th President of the United States."

"What does matter is this: the Russians successfully meddled in our democracy, and our intelligence agencies have concluded that they will do so again."

"My colleagues may think it is OK that the Russians offered dirt on a Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government's attempt to help the Trump campaign. You might think that's OK. My colleagues might think it's OK that when it was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the president's son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help. No, instead that son said that he would love the help of the Russian....You might think that it’s O.K. that the president’s son-in-law sought to establish a secret back channel of communications with the Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility. I don’t think that’s O.K. You might think it’s O.K. that an associate of the president made direct contact with the G.R.U. through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks; that is considered a hostile intelligence agency. You might think that it’s O.K. that the national security-designate secretly conferred with the Russian ambassador about undermining U.S. sanctions. And you might think it’s O.K. he lied about it to the F.B.I. You might say that’s all O.K. You might say that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s O.K. I think it’s immoral. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unpatriotic. And yes, I think it’s corrupt. And evidence of collusion."

"If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right. You know, that’s what they do in the old country, that Colonel Vindman’s father came from. Or the old country that my great grandfather came from, or the old countries that your ancestors came from, or maybe you came from. But here, right is supposed to matter. It’s what’s made us the greatest nation on earth. No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why, if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters, and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost."

"You cannot trust this President to do what's right for the country"

"There is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth."

"Last year, the President promised he would use his pen and phone to ignore the legislative branch and push through his agenda by executive fiat. We have witnessed one executive power grab after another, setting a dangerous precedent and eroding the constitutional balance set forward by our Founders. As the President himself once said, elections have consequences. The most recent one being he must work with the Republican-controlled Congress, rather than spout recycled, failed ideas from past speeches. Americans are looking for leadership. They want solutions."

"Insulting people does not work if your objective is to persuade them. When a person is insulted, they become even more dogmatic in holding their incorrect belief. If you are going to say that the Lord called you to go into politics, then you need to act like it. If you are not going to act like it, then you need to take His name out of the equation."

"Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law's need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest. … Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest."

"Even in a time of ferment and necessary social change—especially in such time—the most important thing about the legal profession is that we inherit the tradition of seven or eight centuries of continuous concern for the institutions and aspirations—for the processes, ideals and sense of right and justice—that make for a free and civilized society. It is not the age of the profession that matters... What matters most is that through the centuries the men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes... in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and a maximum of reason. Our own era has urgent need for lawyers not to resist change but to channel the vital forces at work in the community along the lines of justice and reason, on a scale and at a pace heretofore unprecedented. Only thus can we fulfil our ancient heritage."

"Whether we shall continue to be a Government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide."

"If they [the Department of Justice] are investigating Hillary Clinton, it doesn’t take a genius, let alone a stable genius, to see why. It’s not because there is some new evidence that has come to light. It’s because they’re being badgered by the White House to do it. I think that these cracks that we’re seeing in the independence of the Justice Department ought to concern every American."

"Head of the militant Knights of Labor, he was National Villain No. 1 in the press of the Eighties."

"The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 acted as a catalyst for the protracted workers' rights struggles and widespread sociopolitical change that would define much of the twentieth century. Transformative figures like anarchist organizers Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, Knights of Labor head Terence V. Powderly, and AFL founder Samuel Gompers were all inspired by the massive forty-five-day railroad strike that cost hundreds of millions in damage, resulted in one hundred casualties, and saw a thousand people imprisoned."

"Men having capital, the product of labor to invest, form themselves into companies or associations and consolidate their capital that they may reap a greater profit from their investments … The men who labor, taking this action of the men of capital as a criterion to go by, have formed themselves into companies or associations that they reap a greater profit from the investment of their capital, which is labor. That capital of the former is the creation of man; that latter as the creation of God, and of the two is entitled to the most consideration, since no capital could exist unless labor created it."

"Individually, workingmen are weak, and, when separated, each one follows a different course, without accomplishing anything for himself or his fellow man; but when combined in one common bond of brotherhood, they become as the cable, each strand of which, though weak and insignificant enough in itself, is assisted and strengthened by being joined with others, and the work that one could not perform alone is easily accomplished by a combination of strands."