Quotes About Constitutional Law

#1. I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.

Barack Obama

#2. There's a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are 'legal relativists.' They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they're trying to achieve.

Jonathan Turley

#3. Was the Vietnam conflict a war which should have, as a matter of constitutional law, required a declaration of war by Congress?

Arlen Specter

#4. In law, one's sense of calling or vocation will lead one to be interested in certain dimensions of Constitutional law.

Ken Starr

#5. Every Latter-day Saint should sustain, honor, and obey the constitutional law of the land in which he lives.

Spencer W. Kimball

#6. As a citizen and someone who was a judge on the constitutional law court for 18 years, I feel whenever I can raise my voice with the hope of being heard I need to do it, but I wouldn't assign a special wisdom and responsibility to writers.

Bernhard Schlink

#7. There's a lot of the Midwest and the West in Justice Rehnquist's approach to constitutional law. And by that I mean a recognition that people know pretty well how to govern themselves, that government that is closest to the people is apt to be more responsive to their legitimate concerns and needs.

John Roberts

#8. It was important for the Supreme Court to say it's a matter of constitutional law that everyone is equal, to say everyone is entitled to the dignity that comes from being married to the person you love.

David Boies

#9. If nothing else came out of all of this debacle over Obamacare, one thing that should is a class-action lawsuit against the University of Chicago Law School for people that had Obama as their constitutional law professor.

Louie Gohmert

#10. Now I don't know why he's denying them habeas corpus. I can only assume the guys they got detained over there did something really unforgivable. Like remind Obama he was once a professor of Constitutional Law.

Stephen Colbert

#11. I'm not versed enough in constitutional law to run for office. I'd have to go back to school or something.

Zach Galifianakis

#12. I have three degrees in history and only one in law, but since I came back to specialize in constitutional law where history is so essentially a part and an explanation of much that exists, the two disciplines blended very well.

Frank Scott

#13. Knowing constitutional law helps one at the opera. The trial in 'Billy Budd,' as example, invokes the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Karen DeCrow

#14. In America, the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around," says a constitutional law scholar sympathetic to the antiwar movement on the subject of the anonymous police.

Nathan Hill

#15. The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

Byron White

#16. This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.

Robert H. Jackson

#17. The current constitutional law places the president of the republic in an embarrassing situation.

Jose Eduardo Dos Santos

#18. Indeed, that the Second Amendment poses no barrier to strong gun laws is perhaps the most well-settled proposition in American constitutional law.

Erwin Griswold

#19. Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it's hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters.

Paul Bloom

#20. When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to "get their man." Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome "technicalities" that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties.

Donna Woolfolk Cross

#21. In framing a system which we wish to last for ages, we shd. not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. [James Madison in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, June 26, 1787. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:422.]

James Madison

#22. We are a constitutional monarchy. I don't order laws, I propose them. Article 35 of our constitution states that the king can only refuse a law of parliament once, then he has to sign it - if the same law is then supported by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.

Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa

#23. One might plausibly contend that Congress violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers when it exonerates itself from the impositions of the laws it obligates people outside the legislature to obey.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#24. Since Congress makes the laws they are under the delusion that anything they do is legal, no matter if it is unwise, unethical, or un-Constitutional.

Jim Babka

#25. Liberty is not something a government gives you. It is a right that no government can legally take away.

A.E. Samaan

#26. When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.

William O. Douglas

#27. Laws are made with such attention to protecting women that, if a man's constitutional rights conflict with a woman's protection, his rights disintegrate before her protection disintegrates.

Warren Farrell

#28. In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

Robert Bork

#29. Have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.

John Marshall

#30. There is no right by the federal or state constitution to manual recounts. There is no law that says that you must count dimpled ballots, constitutional or otherwise.

Bill Vaughan

#31. History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.

A.E. Samaan

#32. Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation.

Albie Sachs

#33. But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.

William H. Seward

#34. We have a government of limited power under the Constitution, and we have got to work out our problems on the basis of law.

William Howard Taft

#35. The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded.

Alexander Hamilton

#36. The national will is the supreme law of the Republic, and on all subjects within the limits of his constitutional powers should be faithfully obeyed by the public servant.

Martin Van Buren

#37. [T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. Our United States "State religion" has become Secular Humanism which has no "separation from the State.

James C. Campbell

#39. Statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates.

Emma Goldman

#40. The cause of the South was the cause of constitutional government, the cause of government regulated by law, and the cause of honesty and fidelity in public servants. No nobler cause did man ever fight for!

Benjamin Franklin

#41. We're married. It's my constitutional right to marry anyone I want to marry. That's the law of the land.

Paul Cutiza

#42. Democracy is not just constitutional and legislative rules; it is a culture and practice and adhering by the law and respecting international human rights principles.

Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa

#43. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.

Edward Snowden

#44. Very quickly the lawyers in the Justice Department pulled together a set of recommendations about how we ought to defend the law as a constitutional matter. And it was the lawyers in the Justice Department who thought that it was important to include the tax power argument as part of it.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#45. Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

Alan Bullock

#46. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.

Noah Webster

#47. The very idea of the law in a constitutional republic involves the requisite that it be a rule, a guide, uniform, fixed and equal, for all, till changed by the same high political power which made it. This is what entitles it to its sovereign weight.

Levi Woodbury

#48. Sheriff Knezovich's bill was poorly-written and not constitutional, according to many attorneys, including myself, that reviewed it. We want to go forward with something that's going to stand up to the scrutiny that all bills go under once they've been passed into law.

Matt Shea

#49. A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.

Antonin Scalia

#50. In the criminal law [ ... ] imprisonment should be resorted to only after the most anxious consideration.

Pius Langa

#51. The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts.

Hannah

#52. No higher duty, or more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution-of whatever race, creed or persuasion.

Hugo Black

#53. For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Barack Obama

#54. Love it or hate it, Obamacare is the law of the land. It was passed by Congress, signed into law by President Obama, declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and ratified by a majority of Americans, who reelected the president for a second term.

Hank Johnson

#55. I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.

Ulysses S. Grant

#56. Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

Orrin Hatch

#57. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

#58. Uganda's Constitutional Court will decide whether the military court can proceed with this trial. A nation cannot claim to be operating under the rule of law if its military tribunals ignore the orders of civilian courts.

Bill Vaughan

#59. I do support a constitutional amendment on marriage between a man and a woman, but I would not be going into the states to overturn their state law.

Michele Bachmann

#60. It is unclear how disarming law-abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law. It is at just such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach.

Rick Scott

#61. This understanding, underlying constitutional interpretation since the New Deal, reflects the Constitution's demands for structural flexibility sufficient to adapt substantive laws and institutions to rapidly changing social, economic, and technological conditions.

Stephen Breyer

#62. The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth.

Paul Johnson

#63. There was not a member of the Constitutional Convention who had the least objection to what is contended for by the advocates for a Bill of Rights and trial by jury.

George Washington

#64. If there's a distinct group of Americans who harbor open contempt for constitutional principles and rule of law, it's lawyers, judges and members of Congress.

Walter E. Williams

#65. The Patriot Act has practically obliterated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. It was supposed to be temporary, but there are so many things that the Government likes about the power that it gives, they keep renewing it.

Kenneth Eade

#66. Any new gun control is simply gonna infringe on the law-abiding ability to exercise constitutional rights. There's not a single law that could be written, that has been written, that could be passed that would stop Omar Mateen from getting a gun and shooting people up.

Rush Limbaugh

#67. Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad.

A.E. Samaan

#68. Although the governor strongly disagrees with the court substituting its judgment for the constitutional process of the elected branches or a vote of the people, the court has now spoken clearly as to their view of the New Jersey Constitution, and, therefore, same-sex marriage is the law.

Chris Christie

#69. Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

Abraham Lincoln