In a number of cases dissenting opinions have in time become the law.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.
Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day.
I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.
Dissents speak to a future age.
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
Well, dissent is the tradition in America, and I've been on the side of dissent a good bit of my career, particularly in the last many years of the Republican Congress.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.
Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.