Quotes for All
The framers of our Constitution understood the dangers of unbridled government surveillance. They knew that democracy could flourish only in spaces free from government snooping and interference, and they put restraints on government overreaching in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. . . . These protections require, at a minimum, a neutral arbiter … Read more
The framers of the Constitution realized that . . . there needed to be some guardian of the sober second thought, and so they created the Senate to fulfill that high and vitally important duty. Elihu Root
[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. Fisher Ames
The Constitution’s framers intended to restrict central authority to the few areas that could not be handled by states. The drafters would be horrified at how the present court misapplies what they designed. Doug Bandow
It is time… to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over ‘originalism’ versus ‘dynamism’ or ‘evolution’ and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers. Diane Wood
You can understand why the original framers of judicial ethics thought it would be undignified and would call into question the legitimacy of the judicial decision-making process to have mudslinging by judges, but the way that we hobble people of enormous integrity from defending themselves is, I think, deeply problematic in states where you have … Read more
For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race. David Berlinski
The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom. Dahlia Lithwick
We don’t care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing. Dahlia Lithwick
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. Dahlia Lithwick