Supreme Court of the United States
From Wikiquote
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest judicial body in the United States, and leads the federal judiciary. It consists of the Chief Justice of the United States and eight Associate Justices, who are nominated by the President and confirmed with the "advice and consent" (majority vote) of the Senate. The Supreme Court is primarily an appellate court, but has original jurisdiction over a small range of cases.
[edit] Sourced
- More fifth graders can tell you what a vibrator does than can tell you what a Supreme Court justice does.
- Jacob M. Appel, "Alabama's Bad Vibrations", Huffington Post, Sept. 25, 2009.
- We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution -- not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (March 9, 1937), reported in Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom‎ (2005), p. 411.
- This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.
- Justice Robert H. Jackson, Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U.S. 157, 181 (1943).
- Civil liberties had their origin and must find their ultimate guaranty in the faith of the people. If that faith should be lost, five or nine men in Washington could not long supply its want.
- Justice Robert H. Jackson, Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U.S. 157, 182 (1943).
- The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.
- William O. Douglas, New York Times interview, (29 October 1973).
- The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership.
- William O. Douglas, Time Magazine interview, (12 November 1973).
- I had never before argued a Supreme Court case on my own. Since arguments in that court are thirty minutes in length per side, and since most of the time consumed in argument is taken up with responses to questions of the Court, Dean [Ringel] and I devoted most of our preparation to three overlapping issues, ones that have consumed my attention in every later Supreme Court argument as well. The first was jurisprudential in nature. What rule of law were we urging the Court to adopt? How would it apply in any future case? What would be its impact on First Amendment legal doctrine?
- Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely (2005), p. 65, discussing his argument before the Court in Landmark Communications v. Virginia.
- In the United States at the present day, the reverence which the Greeks gave to the oracles and the Middle Ages to the Pope is given to the Supreme Court. Those who have studied the working of the American Constitution know that the Supreme Court is part of the forces engaged in the protection of the plutocracy. But of the men who know this, some are on the side of the plutocracy, and therefore do nothing to weaken the traditional reverence for the Supreme court, while others are discredited in the eyes of the ordinary quiet citizens by being said to be subversive and Bolshevik.
- Bertrand Russell, Power (1937, reprinted Routledge Classics, 2004), p. 53.
- The cold, cruel reality is that with one current justice now approaching ninety, and four others over seventy, the day will inevitably arrive when a sitting justice lies in an intensive care unit, both unable to resign and unable to resume his or her duties.
- Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Anticipating the Incapacitated Justice, Huffington Post, August 22, 2009.
