David Souter

“Murder has foreseeable consequences. When it happens, it is always to distinct individuals, and after it happens, other victims are left behind.”

“I would like to think that enough examples of non-compromise are going to start people thinking that there must be a better way to try to govern the country.”

“There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.”

“If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.”

“What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible.”

“The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.”

“Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.”

“Every defendant knows, if endowed with the mental competence for criminal responsibility, that the life he will take by his homicidal behavior is that of a unique person, like himself, and that the person to be killed probably has close associates, 'survivors,' who will suffer harms and deprivations from the victim's death.”

“The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.”

“It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.”

“In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.”

“I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great that when the term of court starts, I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.”

“We hold that an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer's conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.”

“The restoration comes not only from the landscape and air, though they play their significant part, but from the people. I feel a strong need to be in New Hampshire for as much of the summer as I can manage it.”

“The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.”

“The obligation of any judge is to decide the case before the court, and the nature of the issue presented will largely determine the appropriate scope of the principle on which its decision should rest.”

“Congress has the power to legislate with regard to activity that, in the aggregate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.”

“History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.”

“The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.”

“There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.”