For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
Potter StewartFor me this is not something that can be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of forced Sunday togetherness.
Potter StewartThe equal protection standard of the constitution has one clear and central meaning - it absolutely prohibits invidious [repugnant] discrimination by government...Under our Constitution, any official action that treats a person differently on account of his race or ethnic origin is inherently [by nature] suspect and presumptively [probably] invalid...Under the Constitution we have, one practice in which government may never engage in the practice of racism - not even "temporarily" and not even as an "experiment."
Potter StewartThe Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree.
Potter StewartIn fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.
Potter StewartTo force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.
Potter StewartWe are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.
Potter Stewart