Quotes · Skopia

21 quotes

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

William J. Brennan, Jr.

New York Times Company v. Sullivan · 1964

★ 1.0

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Schenck v. United States · 1919

★ 1.8

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Immunities that are valid as against the federal government by force of the specific pledges of particular amendments have been found to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, and thus, through the Fourteenth Amendment, become valid as against the states.

Benjamin Cardozo

Palko v. Connecticut · 1937

★ 1.8

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

The government ought not to use evidence obtained and only obtainable, by a criminal act...for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals could escape than that, the Government should play an ignoble part.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Olmstead v. United States · 1928

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

The Court bows to the lessons of experience and the force of better reasoning, recognizing that the process of trial and error, so fruitful in the physical sciences, is appropriate also in the judicial function.

Louis Brandeis

Burnet v. Coronado Oil and Gas Co. · 1932

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Robert H. Jackson

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette · 1943

★ 3.5

Legal opinion · Legal writing

When urgent considerations of the public safety require compromise with the normal principles constraining law enforcement, the normal principles may have to bend. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Richard Posner

Edmond v. Goldsmith · 1999

★ 3.5

Speech · Political speech

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

Charles Evans Hughes

1907

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Dissenting opinion · Legal writing

They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Louis Brandeis

Olmstead v. United States · 1928

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional.

John Marshall

McCulloch v. Maryland · 1819

★ 3.6

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

I know it when I see it.

Potter Stewart

Jacobellis v. Ohio · 1964

★ 3.6

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Dissenting opinion · Legal writing

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.

John Marshall Harlan

Plessy v. Ferguson · 1896

★ 3.7

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

Sandra Day O'Connor

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld · 2004

★ 3.7

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

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… Various guarantees create zones of privacy.

William O. Douglas

Grisworld v. Connecticut · 1965

★ 4.3

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · 1974

★ 5.0

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion.

William O. Douglas

Grisworld v. Connecticut · 1965

★ 5.2

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

Thurgood Marshall

Stanley v. Georgia · 1969

★ 5.3

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

They are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

Roger B. Taney

Dred Scott v. Sandford · 1857

★ 5.4

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

These men and women...ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

Anthony Kennedy

Obergefell v. Hodges · 2015

★ 6.1

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.

Hugo Black

Everson v. Board of Education · 1947

★ 6.8

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