Antonin Scalia Quotes About Constitution

We have collected for you the TOP of Antonin Scalia's best quotes about Constitution! Here are collected all the quotes about Constitution starting from the birthday of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States – March 11, 1936! We hope you will be inspired to new achievements with our constantly updated collection of quotes. At the moment, this page contains 24 sayings of Antonin Scalia about Constitution. We will be happy if you share our collection of quotes with your friends on social networks!
  • If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

    "Scalia Slams 'Living Constitution' Theory", www.foxnews.com. March 14, 2005.
  • There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).

  • Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution's focus upon the individual. ...To pursue the concept of racial entitlement - even for the most admirable and benign of purposes - is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.

    Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 239, 1995.
  • Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

  • That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism; it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.

    "Scalia Raps 'Living Constitution'". www.cbsnews.com. February 14, 2006.
  • Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

    "Scalia accepts infliction of pain to get key information". articles.latimes.com. February 13, 2008.
  • If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.

    "Scalia Slams 'Living Constitution' Theory". www.foxnews.com. March 14, 2005.
  • There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

    "Opinion By Scalia Opposes Broad View Of Police Power" by Stuart Taylor Jr., www.nytimes.com. March 4, 1987.
  • The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.

    "Antonin Scalia, 1936-2016: conservative bulwark who resisted ages of change" by David Smith, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2016.
  • On this day, when we're celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage - to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it's a good idea.

  • You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good.' Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution? It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game.

  • The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.

  • We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There's nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists to impose it on all of us through the Constitution.

  • It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

    Antonin Scalia (2016). “Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents”, p.58, Regnery Publishing
  • [International law] doesn't show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn't show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what's fundamentally important to somebody else today.

  • Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.

    Antonin Scalia (2016). “Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents”, p.131, Regnery Publishing
  • The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt.

  • As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to 'do what the people want,' instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

    "'Get over it': Justice Scalia's most memorable quotes" by Bill Mears, www.foxnews.com. February 15, 2016.
  • Nowhere else in the Constitution does a "right" attributed to "the people" refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention "the people," the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset... The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms... The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it "shall not be infringed."

    "District of Columbia v. Heller". United States Supreme Court, case 07-290, caselaw.findlaw.com. June 26, 2008.
  • The court's job is to uphold the Constitution and you don't call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?

  • If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

    "This Scalia Zinger Is the Funniest Footnote to Come Out of the Supreme Court This Term" by Shane Ferro, www.businessinsider.com. June 26, 2015.
  • It is a Constitution that morphs while you look at it like Plasticman.... That is contrary to our whole tradition, to in God we trust on the coins, to Thanksgiving proclamations, to (Congressional) chaplains, to tax exemption for places of worship, which has always existed in America.

  • Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.

    "Scalia: Constitution does not protect women against discrimination". California Lawyer Interview, voices.washingtonpost.com. January 4, 2011.
  • [The] government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.

    "Supreme Court Justice Bans Media From Free Speech Event". www.govtech.com. March 19, 2003.
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Antonin Scalia

  • Born: March 11, 1936
  • Died: February 13, 2016
  • Occupation: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States