Jeffrey Toobin Quotes

The biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil had begun, and it was on live television. -

Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.

Cameras in the courtroom is a great idea.

It's always interesting to see what judges do when their legal philosophy conflicts with their political views.

Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn't. His whole life was being a judge.

For someone who has been so important to my career, I have had absolutely no interaction with O.J. Simpson one-on-one in my whole life. I've tried many times. I have written him in prison, I've had other contact ... but he never responded, so I have never had a conversation with O.J. Simpson, never met the guy.

To a degree that can scarcely be imagined today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression. In 1972, there were 1,962 actual and attempted bombings in the United States, with twenty-five people killed; in 1973, 1,955 bombings, with twenty-two killed; in 1974, 2,044 bombings, with twenty-four killed. The

He saw the Constitution as the vehicle to keep ecumenical passions in check.

He denounced self-pity and pitied himself.

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote […] task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.

this is a girl who did drugs, who fucked her high school teacher, who chose Berkeley over Stanford. Maybe she really could be one of us.

One of the main things I know about O.J. Simpson is that he is a compulsive talker. So if I were to ask him one question, I would get 45 minutes on the history of the case. It would be irrelevant what I would ask him - he would just start talking.

When will I go home?" Patricia asked. "What, do you want to go home for your birthday?" Cinque sneered. Patricia would turn twenty on February 20. This was, perhaps, the most unnerving thing that Cinque had said to her. He knew her birthday. It underlined that this was no random attack. They had been researching her life, which was chilling. -

Students follow rules. Students complete assignments. The job of students - in part, at least - is to please their teachers. Now, I realize I may be exaggerating a little here, but basically I think I'm right: students do what they're told.

The role of the defense is to be an advocate for their client, regardless of whether he did it or not, within the bounds of the law.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled ten of the thirteen circuit courts of appeals; Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits. Because federal judges have life tenure, nearly all of Obama's judges will continue serving well after he leaves office.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy led directly to the passage of a historic law, the Gun Control Act of 1968.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

Even in Madison's day, the practice of gerrymandering for partisan advantage was familiar. In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison's Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.

on the government

Rodney King is a progenitor of all these cell phone videos that we have. It was unusual that a person had a video camera to take a picture of the Rodney King beating. Now, of course, everybody has a phone, and that has been one of the key factors in all the new attention to the issue.

Judges can receive gifts as long as they report them.

We have never had a president of the United States or a nominee of a major party who was a Supreme Court law clerk.

There is always sleaze in the news. And you know what? The news is always a combination of things that are interesting and things that are important.

According to the telephone poll, a full 40 percent of black women felt that the use of physical force was appropriate in a marriage. And black women especially could not abide Marcia Clark.

To be sure, following her arrest in 1975, she was unlikely to commit these kinds of crimes again. If the United States were a country that routinely forgave the trespasses of such people, there would be little remarkable about the mercy she received following her conviction. But the United States is not such a country; the prisons teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia. These unfortunate souls have no chance at even a single act of clemency, much less an unprecedented two. Rarely have the benefits of wealth, power, and renown been as clear as they were in the aftermath of Patricia's conviction.

In this way, the Hearsts became the symbol of the overly lenient parents of the era and a counterpoint to the Republican administration's voice of discipline and order.