There are lots of classic quotations from Supreme Court cases that every lawyer and law student knows. I for one am very glad that the following line hasn’t become one of them:
“Yet, happily, all constitutional questions are always open.”
Source: Gideon v. Wainright, 372 U.S. 335, 346 (1963) (Douglas, J., concurring).
There are lots of classic quotations from Supreme Court cases that every lawyer and law student knows.
Follow-up…. What are some of those quotes? I’ll start off with one everyone knows: “We must never forget it is a Constitution we are expounding.”
Others?
Re Mike’s question:
One strong candidate would be a quote from Justice Stone’s opinion in United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 (1941) — viz., that the 10th Amendment “states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered.”
[OK comments: JLR, I confess I'm not familar with that one.]
I suspect a list of Chief Justice Marshall’s quotes would contain many of them: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” (Marbury)
“The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance…” (Douglas, Griswold v. Connecticut)
“the [Tenth] amemndment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered.” (United States v. Darby)
A classic legal phrase that developed from Justice Holmes’s dissent in Abrams v. US, 250 U.S. 616 (1919) is the “marketplace of ideas.” However, that phrase did not actually appear in Holmes’s dissent.
Here is the relevant portion of this key dissent, which has become an important foundation of modern free speech jurisprudence:
“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
Rousing words from the Great Dissenter.
P.S. To Matthew: Great minds think alike! (See my above comment dated 3.29.06 at 11:17 pm about Darby.)
The comments to this post are a little slow. Here’s another to keep things rolling: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
Well, counting out both fragments (“all deliberate speed”) and Scalia dissents (Morrison v. Olson, Lamb’s Chapel, “What Is Golf,” etc. etc. etc.), there’s always the dark side:
“Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
“The [Eighth] Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101 (1958).