Trust is not what the framers of the United States constitution and of this country relied on.

It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way.

The federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification.

One of the most extraordinary examples in recent decades [of unitary visions of constitutional enterprise] is found in a book called "Takings"... Epstein makes an extremely clever but stunningly reductionist argument that the whole Constitution is really designed to protect private property... Can a constitution reflecting as diverse an array of visions and aspirations as ours really be reducible to such as sadly single-minded vision as that?

[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.

An excess of law inescapably weakens the rule of law.

There are a lot of things that fit on a bumper sticker in terms of either liberty or equality or progress that when made more concrete just don't pan out.