Occupation: Former Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States Birth: January 23, 1915 Death: December 7, 1985
To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him..
We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation..
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime..
A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person..
The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas."….
May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask i….
The Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree..
We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offe….
The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a "personal" right..
Abortion is inherently different from other medical procedures, because no other procedure involves the purposeful termination of a potential life..
For me this is not something that can be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of forced Sunday togetherness..
Swift justice demands more than just swiftness..
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it..
Fairness is what justice really is..
I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perha….
I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metap….
The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon,….
The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and….
For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject….
These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual..
Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do..