Dahlia Lithwick Quotes

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.

The First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.

The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.

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?

We don't care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing.

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.

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.

Sonia Sotomayor is uniquely and exquisitely sensitive to race issues because she is a Latina.

Thurgood Marshall was uniquely able to understand and comprehend what it meant to grow up in the Jim Crow south.

What's exquisitely weird about the Donald Trump/Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel formulation is that this isn't even a case about race.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.

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.

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.

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.

Never believe in any faith younger than you are.

I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more.

There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.