It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the states the right to maintain a designated "Militia." Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that.

Ever so subtly, without even alluding to the last obstacles preserved by earlier opinions that we now push out of our path, we effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite imcompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.

This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?

The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.

A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.

That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism; it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.

The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.