In this court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.

If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

While the Nation has forbidden monopoly by one set of laws it has been creating them by another. Patent laws, valuable as they may be in some respects, often father monopoly.

One's right to life, liberty, and property depends on the outcome of no election.

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.

Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.

When the Supreme Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.