The U.S. Supreme Court Quotes

“As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges. At the same time, the “hard-wired Constitution,” structural elements of great significance like the over-representation of small states in the United States Senate, remain beyond the reach of any court. “The fixation on the litigated Constitution,” Levinson writes, leads people to “overestimate the importance of courts and judges, for good and for ill.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“While it is unlikely that the size of the Court will ever change again, some scholars, troubled by the increasing length of service on the Court and the advanced age at which justices retire, have recently put forward a proposal that would add new justices, move the oldest into a senior status, and assign the Court’s active work to the most junior nine.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“Robert Dahl’s assessment of the Court’s role in the political system is from his article “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker,” Journal of Public Law 6 (1957) 279–95.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“For illustrations and analysis of the ways in which Justices have shifted over time from their original ideological positions, see the article by Lee Epstein and her co-authors, “Ideological Drift Among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, and How Important?” Northwestern Law Review Colloquy 101 (2007): 127–31.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“For a recent citation of John Marshall’s famous line about the Court’s “province and duty” to “say what the law is,” see the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, invalidating an act of Congress that stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear cases brought by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy said that “[t]o hold the political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will… would permit a striking anomaly in our tripartite system of government, leading to a regime in which Congress and the President, not this Court, say ‘what the law is’” [citing Marbury].”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“These decisions sparked a strong negative response from conservatives in Congress. In 2004, after the Atkins and Lawrence rulings, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, F. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, addressed the members of the Judicial Conference, gathered for their spring meeting at the Supreme Court. “Inappropriate judicial adherence to foreign laws or legal tribunals threatens American sovereignty, unsettles the separation of powers carefully crafted by our Founders, and threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the American judicial process,”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“Critics have focused on three Supreme Court opinions decided between 2002 and 2005. All three moved the law in a progressive direction, with the majority opinions citing the views of foreign courts or lawmakers. These foreign sources were clearly not invoked as determinative of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, nor could they have been. But mere mention of the foreign materials provoked anger by framing the question of how to interpret the Constitution in a global context of evolving views on human dignity.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“Between 1799 and 1810 the legislatures of New Jersey, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania passed statutes forbidding the state courts from citing any cases decided by English courts after July 4, 1776.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“In addition to institutional embarrassment in many quarters, there was a particular irony to this failure of information. The Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence depends to a considerable measure on the justices’ assessment of public opinion as reflected in statutes. A punishment that is demonstrably “unusual” is deemed constitutionally problematic.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“The promise of constancy, once given, binds its maker for as long as the power to stand by the decision survives and the understanding of the issue has not changed so fundamentally as to render the commitment obsolete.….”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“The root of American governmental power is revealed most clearly in the instance of the power conferred by the Constitution upon the Judiciary of the United States and specifically upon this Court. As Americans of each succeeding generation are rightly told, the Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court’s power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“majority described the pressure on the Court and explained why “principles of institutional integrity” required that Roe v. Wade be reaffirmed. A “terrible price would be paid for overruling,” the three justices wrote, adding that such a step “would seriously weaken the Court’s capacity to exercise the judicial power and to function as the Supreme Court of a Nation dedicated to the rule of law.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“With new Supreme Court appointments during the ensuing decade, the margin of support within the Court for maintaining the right to abortion appeared to shrink to the vanishing point.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“During the 1980s, however, the Court came under increasing pressure to repudiate Roe v. Wade. First the Reagan administration and then the administration of President George H. W. Bush asked the Court to overturn the decision, on five separate occasions. In 1980 the Republican party’s platform had called for the first time for the appointment of judges “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“The political reaction against Roe v. Wade built slowly. The first justice to join the Court after the January 1973 decision was John Paul Stevens, named by President Gerald Ford in December 1975. Yet remarkably enough, the nominee was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. If the senators’ questions during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing provide a reliable window onto the country’s law-related concerns, then it is reasonable to conclude that abortion had not yet become a national political issue nearly three years after the Court’s decision.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“So the justices could plausibly assume that the decision they were about to hand down would meet with general public approval—as in fact it initially did, before the abortion issue became entangled, later in the 1970s, with partisan politics and the rise of the religious Right.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“It was therefore understandable, Dahl said, “that the policy views dominant on the Court are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“The political scientist Robert A. Dahl observed more than a half century ago that the Supreme Court “is an essential part of the political leadership,” part of the “dominant political alliance.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“perhaps the expression of public support for the Court reflects what political scientists call the “legitimation hypothesis,” the theory that once the Supreme Court rules on an issue, a measurable proportion of the public will come to the conclusion that “if they believe it, it must be right.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“perhaps the public expression of trust in the Supreme Court reflects a leap of faith rather than actual knowledge; people want to believe in some governmental institution, and they are more likely to be able to identify what they don’t like about the political branches. Or”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“And yet, over time, the Court and the public seem to maintain a certain equilibrium. Public opinion polls regularly reflect that “diffuse” approval for the Supreme Court—that is, approval of the institution in general, rather than of particular actions—is higher than for other institutions of government.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“The justices whose behavior provoked the Roosevelt court-packing plan were criticized from the Left; the Warren Court from the Right; and the Roberts Court, to a somewhat more modulated degree, from the Left again.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“Scholars regard the relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion as elusive. Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, two leaders in the empirical study of judicial behavior, titled an article: “Does Public Opinion Influence the Supreme Court? Possibly Yes (But We’re Not Sure Why).” The article surveyed the political science literature on the question, much of it inconclusive and contradictory. At best, the authors conclude, there seems to be an association between the Court and public opinion, but not enough evidence to “make the leap from association to causality,” that is, to prove that public opinion actually influences the Court.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity,” is how O’Connor summarized the core of the argument for the law school’s position. She left little doubt that she had been persuaded not only”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity,”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“if a judge on coming to the bench were to decide to seal himself off hermetically from all manifestations of public opinion, he would accomplish very little; he would not be influenced by current public opinion, but instead would be influenced by the state of public opinion at the time he came to the bench.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“Judges, so long as they are relatively normal human beings, can no more escape being influenced by public opinion in the long run than can people working at other jobs,”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“We all rely on public confidence and trust to give the courts’ decisions their force,” Justice O’Connor said in a lecture on “public trust as a dimension of equal justice.” She explained: “We don’t have standing armies to enforce opinions, we rely on the confidence of the public in the correctness of those decisions. That’s why we have to be aware of public opinions and of attitudes toward our system of justice, and it is why we must try to keep and build that trust.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

“zone of twilight” in which “the president acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority.” He then “can only rely upon his own independent powers,” and whether that reliance is legitimate “is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law.”
― Linda Greenhouse, The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction