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our Constitution shields the right to think, speak, and write without fear of reprisal from governmental authorities.IV
It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. “In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little
deaf.”
When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.
Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.
The Court’s main trust is to repair fractures in federal law, to step in when other courts have disagreed on what the relevant federal law requires.
For both men and women the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show. . . . As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.XII
few would agree that what is deemed constitutional is necessarily worthy or wise.
When attempts to prevent certain forms of behavior may place individual rights and liberties in peril, the criminal sanction should be saved as a last resort.
We may be anxious to reduce crime, but we should remember that in our system of justice, the presumption of innocence is prime, and the law cannot apply one rule to Joe who is a good man, and another to John, who is a hardened criminal.
Ruth is somebody who is simply
not afraid of dead air time. If you ask her a question that requires a thought-through answer she will stop, think it through and then answer it.
“We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor equal respect until we command it.”
“Guys think law school is hard, and we just think we’re stupid.”
long-term relief for environmental problems requires increased attention to birth control.
As you can see, in bringing those Tax Court advance sheets to Ruth’s big room forty years ago, I changed history. For the better. And, I shall claim, thereby rendered a significant service to the nation.
“necessary to a compelling state interest”
For women who want to exercise options that do not fit within stereotypical notions of what is proper for a female, women who do not want to be “protected” but do want to develop their individual potential without artificial constraints, classifications reinforcing traditional male-female roles are hardly “benign.”
the Equal Rights Amendment does not force anyone happy as a housewife to relinquish that role. On the contrary, it enhances that role by making it plain that it was chosen, not thrust on her without regard to her preference.
“Traditionally, [differential treatment on the basis of sex] was rationalized by an attitude of ‘romantic paternalism’ which, in practical effect [often] put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”
Judge Hand defined that spirit, in a way I fully embrace, as one which is not too sure that it is right, and so seeks to understand the minds of other men and women and to weigh the interests of others alongside its own without bias. The spirit Judge Learned Hand described strives for a community where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. I will keep that wisdom in the front of my mind as long as I am capable of judicial service.
The judiciary is third in line and it is placed apart from the political fray so that its members can judge fairly, impartially, in accordance with the law, and without fear about the animosity of any pressure group.
Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo said, “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”
Judges in our system are bound to decide concrete cases, not abstract issues.
A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes counseled, “[O]ne of the most sacred duties of a judge is not to read [her] convictions into [the Constitution].” I have tried and I will continue to try to follow the model Justice Holmes set in holding that duty sacred.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ginsburg joined the dissenters in the contrary view: “[There is a] legal and practical difference . . . between the use of race-conscious criteria . . . to keep the races apart, and the use of race-conscious criteria . . . to bring the races together.” As she told her audience, it is her belief that “[w]e will all profit from a more diverse, inclusive society, understanding, accommodating, even celebrating our difference,
while pulling together for the common good.”
More than any other officials in Washington, the Justices still do their own work, assisted only by a handful of young law clerks.
judicial independence is vulnerable to assault; it can be shattered if the society law exists to serve does not take care to ensure its preservation.
engaging in a dialogue with, not a diatribe against, coequal departments of government, state authorities, and even her own colleagues.
As historian Richard Morris has written, a prime portion of the history of the U.S. Constitution is the story of the extension (through amendment, judicial interpretation, and practice) of constitutional rights and protections to once-excluded groups: to people who were once held in bondage, to men without property, to Native Americans, and to women.
With prestige to persuade, but not physical power to enforce, with a will for self-preservation and the knowledge that they are not “a bevy of Platonic Guardians,”145 the Justices generally follow, they do not lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.
To sum up, Brown both reflected and propelled the development of human rights protection internationally. It was decided with the horrors of the Holocaust in full view, and with the repressive regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and South Africa a then-current reality. It propelled an evolution yet unfinished toward respect, in law and in practice, for the human dignity of all the world’s people.
When an employer’s religious practice detrimentally affects others, however, the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause does not require accommodation to that practice.
A wise legal scholar famously said of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee: “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other [person’s] nose begins.”
claims.” The fatal flaw, in any event, bears reiteration. The extension cure would
equate two dissimilar categories: on the one hand, commercial businesses like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, whose workforces, by law, are open to persons of all faiths, and on the other, nonprofit organizations designed to further the mission of a particular community of believers.
allowing a religion-based exemption to a commercial employer would “operat[e] to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.”
How is the Court to divine when a religious belief is feigned “to escape legal sanction,” or which genuine beliefs are worthy of accommodation and which are not?
In passing RFRA, Congress did not alter a tradition in which one person’s right to free exercise of her religion must be kept in harmony with the rights of her fellow citizens, and with the common good.
prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health. The Court asserts that its ruling furthers the government’s interest in “promoting fetal life.” But the Act scarcely furthers that interest, for it targets only a method of abortion. The woman may abort the fetus, so long as her doctor uses another method, one her doctor judges less safe for her. The Court further pretends that its decision protects women. Women might come to regret their physician-counseled choice of an intact D&E and suffer from “[s]evere depression and loss of esteem,” the Court worries. Notably, the solution the
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