Top 30 Dahlia Lithwick Quotes
#1. On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years. We've just lost a great writer in Antonin Scalia.
Dahlia Lithwick
#2. We don't care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing.
Dahlia Lithwick
#3. There can be no difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples anywhere in the USA.
Dahlia Lithwick
#4. A lot of conservative writers have twisted that argument in the conversation around Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel and said this is identity politics as played by liberals. And that I think what they're trying to say is that progressives are the first to say.
Dahlia Lithwick
#5. Sonia Sotomayor is uniquely and exquisitely sensitive to race issues because she is a Latina.
Dahlia Lithwick
#6. Even Merrick Garland can't get up and give a press conference in which he says, "Give me a damn vote." We just hear silence.
Dahlia Lithwick
#7. Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel has not said anything, and in fact, cannot say anything. But I would even broaden it out to, you know, judges who are victims of attack ads in say state Supreme Court elections can't talk back. Judges are really barred from commenting on this kind of huge public hue and cry.
Dahlia Lithwick
#8. I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more.
Dahlia Lithwick
#9. I wonder if there's just a sense that we have nothing to learn from any Supreme Court justice, including the great Chief Justice John Marshall.
Dahlia Lithwick
#10. What's exquisitely weird about the Donald Trump/Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel formulation is that this isn't even a case about race.
Dahlia Lithwick
#11. Donald Verrilli has argued 37 cases in five years on behalf of the [Barak] Obama administration. Many of them turned out to be truly landmark cases. He is the seventh-longest-serving solicitor general in American history.
Dahlia Lithwick
#13. I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.
Dahlia Lithwick
#14. I want to stay on the subject of marriage equality because this is the part of the show that everybody loves but you hate if you're the one who has to hear your own voice.
Dahlia Lithwick
#15. I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis.
Dahlia Lithwick
#16. There's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.
Dahlia Lithwick
#17. Am I right in saying that the locust of this problem is simply that judges in America are half political animals and half oracular demigods?
Dahlia Lithwick
#18. Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.
Dahlia Lithwick
#19. The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.
Dahlia Lithwick
#21. The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.
Dahlia Lithwick
#22. Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states
which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.
Dahlia Lithwick
#23. What's doubly, possibly triply weird about the [Donald] Trump claim is that I said something really hateful and offended an entire class of people, and in a case that actually has nothing to do with race he should still be conflicted out.
Dahlia Lithwick
#24. The First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.
Dahlia Lithwick
#25. The criticism from the other side of [race] debate - and these are not necessarily I think defenders of [Donald] Trump, but they're certainly quick to say, you know, if you're going to live by the race card, you die by the race card.
Dahlia Lithwick
#26. The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.
Dahlia Lithwick
#27. Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.
Dahlia Lithwick
#28. Thurgood Marshall was uniquely able to understand and comprehend what it meant to grow up in the Jim Crow south.
Dahlia Lithwick
#29. One of the things that drives me batty is people who think they're court watchers, who say, "Oh, Clarence Thomas. You know, his clerks do all the work for him. You know, he doesn't deserve to be there, and has never done anything."
Dahlia Lithwick
#30. Aaron Persky who is the judge who really I think it's fair to say there is a mob seeking to recall him because of what's perceived as a too-lenient sentence in a sexual assault case.
Dahlia Lithwick
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