Constitutionality Quotes

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. (Felix Frankfurter)

I hope that your committee will not permit doubt as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation (the Guffey Coal Control Bill)

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion.

Everett Dirksen

There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.

Earl Warren

The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.

Gary Bauer

Judges are the people who have to protect the rights of individuals, have to protect the rights of minorities, have to protect the rights in the Constitution, have to protect the requirement that the executive and the legislature not simply exercise raw power but adhere to standards of reasonableness and constitutionality.

Jed S. Rakoff

Nullification is the Jeffersonian idea that the states of the American Union must judge the constitutionality of the acts of their agent, the federal government, since no impartial arbiter between them exists.

Thomas Woods

This is an instrument in the hands of the people for fighting the fascist saboteurs, because the Chilean armed forces are a guarantee of constitutionality and integrity.

Salvador Allende