Our favorite SCOTUS quotes – SCOTUSblog

Somewhat to our surprise, one of the most popular features of the SCOTUStoday newsletter (which you should sign up for, if you haven’t already) has turned out to be the SCOTUS Quotes.

Although we didn’t include these in the first few editions of SCOTUStoday, since Oct. 6 we’ve brought you around 80 such quotations, mostly consisting of remarks made by Supreme Court justices either at oral argument or in their opinions.

In general, the quotes we’ve used fall into two buckets: (1) humor from the bench or (2) discussion of a justice’s legal philosophy. Without further ado, here are a few of our favorites from both categories.

Humor from the bench

As we’ve previously noted, Justice Neil Gorsuch currently holds the title of the funniest justice (prior champions having been Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia). So, it’s no surprise that Gorsuch is responsible for, or involved in, some of the more humorous exchanges, including this one (concerning a very serious issue) from the recently argued Little v. Hecox.

MS. HARTNETT: “You heard my friend on the other side talk about, not about cross-dressing or other laws. They didn’t have any response to our point because there isn’t one, that transgender people were categorically excluded from immigration to this country under an overall umbrella of being a psychopath. That was the way –that was the actual decision of this Court in the Boutilier case. It was interpreting language of Congress that determined that when Congress used the term ‘psychopathic personality’ to exclude people, they meant to include homosexuals and other sex perverts. And then that –­”

JUSTICE GORSUCH: “Perhaps not our finest hour.”

MS. HARTNETT: “Well, it’s not your fault, but I think that –­”

JUSTICE GORSUCH: “Thank you for that.”

There’s also this exchange (although the humor was supplied by the advocate, not Gorsuch) from Olivier v. City of Brandon, Mississippi:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: “What — what’s your best shot in maybe two lines?”

MR. BUTLER: “How many commas do I get?”

But perhaps the funniest exchange was thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy in District of Columbia v. Wesby (as a side note, this is one of Amy Howe’s favorite cases of all time):

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “I — I hate to keep raising the point, but did you challenge the assertion that they said it was a bachelor party in your brief in opposition …”

MR. GARRETT: “No, it was — it was — we agree that they all said it was a bachelor party.”

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “I’m sorry, what is –”

JUSTICE GINSBURG: “I thought some said it was a birthday party.”

MR. GARRETT: “No, Your Honor. That — that evidence — I mean, that evidence came out at a trial, at the trial after summary judgment. Officer Campanale changed his story –”

JUSTICE KENNEDY: “So Peaches is the host at a bachelor party. Is that it?”

(Laughter.) 

MR. GARRETT: “Yes.”

If you were wondering, this case involved 16 partygoers who sued the Metropolitan Police Department for false arrest following a March 2008 house party hosted by “Peaches” (or “Tasty”).

From Amy’s opinion analysis at the time: “Theodore Wesby attended a party in the northeast section of Washington, D.C., that his own attorney would later describe as ‘raucous.’ There were strippers offering lap dances, plenty of alcohol, people having sex upstairs, and (at least the smell of) marijuana. … Police arrested the partygoers for trespassing and took them to the police station, where they were eventually charged with disorderly conduct. Those charges were dropped, but Theodore Wesby and 15 other partygoers then filed their own lawsuit, arguing that the police had lacked probable cause to arrest them because the officers didn’t have any reason to believe that the partygoers knew that they weren’t supposed to be there.”

The partygoers lost. Badly.

On another occasion, Chief Justice Roberts had a biting reply to counsel, in Lightfoot v. Cendant Mortgage Corp.:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: “Don’t tell us we’re not working hard enough.”

MR. BROOKS: “I do recall, Justice Kennedy, that once upon a time, the Court took 150 cases a year. Maybe foreclosures could be among them.”

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “They were easier cases.”

MR. BROOKS: “Perhaps I should sit down.”

Finally, there was this “classic” exchange between Justices Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith:

JUSTICE THOMAS: “The — let’s say that I’m both a Prince fan, which I was in the ’80s, and –”

(Laughter.) 

JUSTICE KAGAN: “No longer?”

(Laughter.) 

JUSTICE THOMAS: “Well –”

(Laughter.) 

JUSTICE THOMAS: “– so only on Thursday nights.”

To take a word from our “funniest justice article”: In a time of partisan discord and caricatures, the justices’ humor reminds us of their “humanity; that they are people who make good (and bad) jokes, just like the rest of us.”

Discussion of a justice’s legal philosophy

The second category of quotations we’ve regularly used in SCOTUStoday concern the justices’ legal philosophies, often in the context of specific cases.

In this area, few figures stand out (for good or ill) as strongly as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who remarked in a highly influential article from 1897:

“The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. And the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”

One of our more recent SCOTUStoday’s featured a one-line quote by Justice Felix Frankfurter (a mentee of Holmes’) in Johnson v. United States:

“Federal judges are not referees at prize fights but functionaries of justice.”

Also of note is Justice John Marshall Harlan II’s (classically conservative) statement in Reynolds v. Sims:

“The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare, nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements.”

More recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett had this to say to Ross Douthat of The New York Times about today’s leading judicial philosophy:

“I think it’s a common misconception that answers are easy and that if you can just find the right theory, there’s the promise of certitude. And no legal theory can deliver that. That includes originalism.”

And then there are quotations that straddle both categories. As Scalia characteristically remarked in the 1998 case of National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley about the court’s majority opinion:

“‘The operation was a success, but the patient died.’ What such a procedure is to medicine, the Court’s opinion in this case is to law.”

Please feel free to send in your favorite SCOTUS quotes – if they hit the mark, we’d be very happy to feature them in a future newsletter!