Mark Tushnet Quotes (16 Quotes)

When the history of the Supreme Court in the 20th century is written, there will be two great chief justices Earl Warren and William Rehnquist. Both presided over courts that changed the law in a very dramatic way.

He and his colleagues opened a number of doors that the next court can choose to walk through or not, ... Those doors weren't opened before he arrived.

Sen. Specter's position is that Congress is creating the interest in ensuring that its powers are respected, which is injured when the court's rule against them, ... And so given that interest and injury, his argument is they have standing to intervene.

Unlike with Kennedy, there was no honeymoon period for conservatives, ... Souter relatively quickly moved to the left. And there were explicit assurances from then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu that Souter was a conservative.

When he started, the law was tilted in a liberal direction. Now it's not really tilted in a conservative direction, but it's more of a level playing field.

The Supreme Court has said Congress does have the power to create new legal interests -- to confer standing on people who otherwise wouldn't have it,

The court has gotten more conservative as the country has, but individual members of the court haven't changed certainly not Rehnquist. The court and the country changed around him.

In A Court Divided, ... I never had to think about these things until I came to Washington. I never thought about them. I had no settled views.

I don't think his fundamental views changed over the roughly 30 years he was on the court.

I think he'd look back and say his greatest disappointment was his inability to lead the court to overrule Roe V. Wade.

He was working for the people of the United States.

I think toward the end of his tenure he was more sensitive to the compromises that you have to make if you're going to assemble a majority.

It's one thing for people to know what your voice is and another to know what you look like.

Still, the Supreme Court is another kind of universe. If there were an ad for the job, it would be, 'Inside work, no heavy lifting,' ... The justices hear only the cases they want to hear, write only what they want to write. It's great.

The difficulty with the administration's position is that, at least as applied to U. S. citizens, it poses a threat to essentially anyone who the administration chooses to call an enemy combatant,

When you put the memo together with his voting registration challenges and with his opposition to a local antidiscrimination ordinance in Phoenix, ... you get a picture of somebody for whom issues of racial justice and nondiscrimination were not a high priority.