If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.

The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.

There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).

This is so absurd that it has, to my knowledge, never been contemplated.

You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good.' Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution? It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game.

The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the unalienable rights with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims 'all Men are endowed by their Creator.'

[International law] doesn't show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn't show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what's fundamentally important to somebody else today.