Supreme Court Quotations

[John C. Eastman]

For succinctly settling any ambiguity about where he stood in the debate over
the role of the Declaration of Independence in constitutional interpretation, I
nominate this passage from Justice Thomas's concurring opinion in Adarand:
"There can be no doubt that the paternalism that appears to lie at the heart of
this program is at war with the principle of inherent equality that underlies
and infuses our Constitution.  See Declaration of Independence ("We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness").

And, since the 1990 barrier has already been broken, I nominate this entry from
Justice Blackmun's concurring opinion in Parker v. Levy, for sheer chutzpah
because written the year after his opinion in Roe v. Wade:
"Relativistic notions of right and wrong, or situation ethics, as some call it,
have
achieved in recent times a disturbingly high level of prominence in this
country,
both in the guise of law reform, and as a justification of conduct that persons

would normally eschew as immoral and even illegal. The truth is that the moral
horizons of the American people are not footloose, or limited solely by 'the
civil
code of Tennessee.' The law should, in appropriate circumstances, be flexible
enough to recognize the moral dimension of man and his instincts concerning
that which is honorable, decent, and right."