It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.
From David Souter
We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.
The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.
Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.
I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.
I would like to think that enough examples of non-compromise are going to start people thinking that there must be a better way to try to govern the country.
If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.
The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.
For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, 'Brown' must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.
The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which 'Plessy' was based had changed.
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