Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.

The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.

I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis.

There can be no difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples anywhere in the USA.

I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.

Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel has not said anything, and in fact, cannot say anything. But I would even broaden it out to, you know, judges who are victims of attack ads in say state Supreme Court elections can't talk back. Judges are really barred from commenting on this kind of huge public hue and cry.

There's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.