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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

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Dahlia Lithwick
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More quotes by Dahlia Lithwick

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I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.
Dahlia Lithwick
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In [Philip] Howard's view, our reliance on law, lawyers, and lawsuits has turned Americans into fat, neurotic cowards who 'go through the day looking over their shoulder instead of where they want to go.'
Dahlia Lithwick
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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
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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.
Dahlia Lithwick
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The First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.
Dahlia Lithwick
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Dahlia Lithwick
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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
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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
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Sonia Sotomayor is uniquely and exquisitely sensitive to race issues because she is a Latina.
Dahlia Lithwick
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I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more.
Dahlia Lithwick
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Never believe in any faith younger than you are.
Dahlia Lithwick
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There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.
Dahlia Lithwick
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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