Laurence Tribe Quotes

[T]he framers had derived the conviction that human rights could best be preserved by inaction and indirection—shielded behind... deliberately fragmented centers of countervailing power, in a vision almost Newtonian...

That all lawful power derives from the people and must be held in check to preserve their freedom is the oldest and central tenet of American constitutionalism. ...[I]t was believed that personal freedom could be secured more effectively by decentralization than by express command.

[T]hese models are not... mutually exclusive... discourse in any given period can... draw on... more than one model. ...Their main function is . ...[T]he models ...grow out of immersion in judicial decisions and lawyers' arguments ...[T]hey should be ...familiar themes ...

The models... (I) separated and divided powers; (II) implied limitations of government; (III) settled expectations; (IV) governmental regularity (V) preferred rights; (VI) equal protection; and (VII) structural justice.

I... organize the constitutional principles, rules, and theories... in terms of the seven basic models that... have represented the major alternatives for constitutional argument and decision in American law from the early 1800s to the present.

[T]he Constitution is an historically discontinuous composition... the product... of a series of not altogether coherent compromises; it mirrors no single vision or philosophy but reflects instead a set of sometimes reinforcing and sometimes conflicting ideals and notions.

[T]he conventional ways even of stating the choices between greater freedom or equality, on the one hand, and greater governmental power, on the other... and particularly the conventional emphasis on "balancing interests"... are remarkably unilluminating as well as misleadingly ahistorical.

Given its remarkable activism in constraining the President vis-à-vis Congress and the courts and in limiting Congress vis-à-vis the States, the current Supreme Court cannot be understood as pursuing a modest institutional role. ...I prefer postulates honestly expressed to analyses whose underlying assumptions are obscured by the jargon of neutral principles and the language of "objective" legal description.

[A]ttempts to treat constitutional doctrine neutrally elide important questions and obscure available answers.

[T]he morality of responsible scholarship points not at all to the classic formula of supposedly value-free detachment and allegedly unbiased description. Instead such morality points to an avowal of the substantive beliefs and commitments that necessarily inform any account of constitutional arguments and conclusions.

[T]he highest mission of the Supreme Court... is not to conserve judicial credibility, but in the Constitution's own phrase, "to form a more perfect Union" between right and rights within the charter's necessarily evolutionary design.

The inescapable boundaries of societal context and consciousness argue... that [judges] must raise distinctive voices of principle.

Judicial neutrality necessarily involves taking sides. ...[J]udicial restraint is but another form of judicial activism.

[T]he Constitution is an intentionally incomplete, often deliberately indeterminate structure for the participatory evolution of political ideals and government practices.

[T]he courts that held slaves to be non-persons, separate to be equal, and pregnancy to be non sex-related can hardly be deemed either final or infallible.