The death penalty is barbaric. And I think we as a society need to come face-to-face with that. If we're not willing to face up to the cruelty, we ought not to be doing it.

The more heavily the government regulates the market, the more competition is impeded.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

The First Amendment is really at the very core of political speech, and political speech is at the core of the First Amendment. So, we want to be very careful to make sure that candidates for office are free to express their views so that people will make an informed choice. We don't want them holding back, and sort of concealing their views and then disclosing them afterwards.

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

Most of us continue to believe that those who show utter contempt for human life by committing remorseless, premeditated murder justly forfeit the right to their own life.

Appellate review is not a magic wand and we undermine public confidence in the judicial process when we make it look like it is.