Dahlia Lithwick Quotes

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.

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

There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.

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?

There can be no difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples anywhere in the USA.

For the most part, much of the legal world's attention has been focused on Donald Trump and his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who is currently presiding over the Trump University fraud cases in California. Trump somehow managed to offend surprising numbers of establishment Republicans.

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.

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

I've been thinking so much about how grateful I am to cover the court because the constraints of calm and civility are really palpable when you look across the street, and that, you know, I feel like the discourse has become so overheated that, you know, we talk about everything in the exact tone that seems to sort of preclude reason and to preclude the possibility of agreement.

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.

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.

I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists.

On the one hand we want to preserve the integrity of the judicial branch, and we want to talk about judicial independence, and how damaging and dangerous it is when Donald Trump calls out Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel. And at the same time, at the end of the day, judges work for us and we can recall them and we can impeach them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never believe in any faith younger than you are.

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