William Rehnquist Quotes

It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as [giving blacks, Latinos and Jews the right to be served in local motels, hotels and restaurants].

[I]f...a society adopts a constitution and incorporates in that constitution safeguards of individual liberty, these safeguards do indeed take on a general moral rightness or goodness. They assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by the people.

All of these factors are subsumed to a greater or lesser extent by observing that the Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity. The well-known checks and balances provided by the framers of the Constitution have supplied the necessary centrifugal force to make the Court independent of Congress and the president.

Every judge who has sat on a case involving a constitutional claim must have surely experienced the feeling that the particular law being challenged was either unjust or silly or vindictive. It is unfortunately all too easy to translate these visceral reactions into a determination to find some way to hold the law unconstitutional.

The justices were not appointed to roam at large in the realm of public policy and strike down laws that offend their own ideas of what is desirable and what is undesirable.

A judge's disposition should be about evenly balanced between sail and anchor. He cannot be anchored to the past mechanically, but he ought not be moved by every puff of novel doctrine.

a frank acknowledgment that there is not under our Constitution a judicial remedy for every political mischief, for every undesirable exercise of legislative power.

The framers reconciled in a somewhat rough-hewn way the need for an antimajoritarian institution such as the Supreme Court to interpret a written constitution within a broader system of government basically committed to majority rule.

The New Deal Court was now in place. It had already sounded the death knell for such doctrines of the old Court as “freedom of contract,” and a limiting view of congressional authority under the Commerce Clause.

Chief Justice Hughes once said that he tried to write his opinions clearly and logically, but if he needed the fifth vote of a colleague who insisted on putting in a paragraph that did not “belong,” in it went, and he let the law reviews figure out what it meant.

Driving back on that hot June day past some government buildings, the Justice commented that he thought one of the great harms wrought by central air conditioning was that it had enabled the government in Washington to function during the summer, rather than closing up shop and leaving people alone the way it had formerly done.

There is little reason to think that many members of the American public either understood or sympathized with the particular doctrines espoused by the majority of the Court in holding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, but the defeat of the Court-packing plan made it obvious that the public did not want even a very popular president to tamper with the Supreme Court of the United States. Whatever the shortcomings of its doctrine in the public mind, its judgments were not to be reversed by the simple expedient of creating new judgeships and filling them with administration supporters.

But no serious student of the subject would claim that the constitutional grant of authority to Congress to regulate “commerce among the several states” was limited to the regulation of sailing ships and stagecoaches to the exclusion of steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes.

President Franklin Roosevelt failed in his effort to pack the Court in 1937, but in the midst of that battle the Court significantly altered its constitutional doctrine in a way that served to placate its opponents.

But there is no reason to doubt that it will continue as a vital and uniquely American institutional participant in the everlasting search of civilized society for the proper balance between liberty and authority, between the state and the individual.