“Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Lynn. I am a hundred years young. I’m here to protest our school district’s book-banning policy. My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II, at a very young age, he was only 26, defending our democracy, Constitution, and freedoms. One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned. They stopped the free press, banned and burned books. The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth. Banned books, and burning books, are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control. My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this. Thank you very much. Thank you.” – Grace Lynn, at Martin County, Florida, school board meeting, March 21, 2023 (quoted by Brandon Gage, in AlterNet, March 22, 2023)
Category: The American Constitution
“It’s a foundational requirement to train on civil unrest, civil disturbance, civil disobedience nationwide. We train for that in the National Guard.” – Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “Interview of General William Walker, December 13, 2021”
“A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?” – Marilynne Robinson, “What Are We Doing Here?”
“This Republic means something. It means something to me. I’ve buried a lot of soldiers, and my dad and mom fought in World War II, relatives that fought in a lot different wars. And this country means something, and Constitution means something. And it’s bigger than us, bigger than any one of us, and we’ve got to protect it. If we don’t protect it, then God help us down the road.” – Gen. Mark A. Milley, USA, November 17, 2021
“It’s not the election that creates a democracy; it’s that peaceful transition of power.” – Lt. Gen. Walter A. Piatt, USA, November 3, 2021
“From the earliest times when man chose to guide his relations with fellow men by allegiance to the rule of law rather than force, he has been faced with the problem how best to deal with the individual in society who through moral conviction concluded that a law with which he was confronted was unjust and therefore must not be followed. Faced with the stark reality of injustice, men of sensitive conscience and great intellect have sometimes found only one morally justified path, and that path led them inevitably into conflict with established authority and its laws. Among philosophers and religionists throughout the ages there has been an incessant stream of discussion as to when, if at all, civil disobedience, whether by passive refusal to obey a law or by its active breach, is morally justified. However, they have been in general agreement that while in restricted circumstances a morally motivated act contrary to law may be ethically justified, the action must be non-violent and the actor must accept the penalty for his action. In other words, it is commonly conceded that the exercise of a moral judgment based upon individual standards does not carry with it legal justification or immunity from punishment for breach of the law.” – Judge Sobeloff, United States of America v. Mary Moylan
“We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.” – Judge Sobeloff, United States of America v. Mary Moylan
“An aspect of the deadlock in British and American politics today is the way in which the hinterland of the left’s assumptions remains determinatively Protestant. Indeed its subjectivism, emotionalism, restrictive puritanism, iconoclasm, and opposition to high culture owe more in the end to the Reformation than they do to the Enlightenment. These attitudes are all powerless to resist capitalism and bureaucracy, because both are profoundly promoted by the mainstream Protestant legacy. Even the radical Protestant legacy is in the end unable to think beyond individualism, sectarian isolation, and collectivism—which is but individualism dialectically inverted or else writ large.” – John Milbank, “The Politics of Paradox”
“Originalism is the only approach to text that is compatible with democracy. When government-adopted texts are given a new meaning, the law is changed; and changing written law, like adopting written law in the first place, is the function of the first two branches of government—elected legislators and (in the case of authorized prescriptions by the executive branch) elected executive officials and their delegates. Allowing laws to be rewritten by judges is a radical departure from our democratic system.” – Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (emphasis in original)
“Every word employed in the constitution is to be expounded in its plain, obvious, and common sense, unless the context furnishes some ground to control, qualify, or enlarge it. Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings.” – Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
“The ordinary-meaning rule is the most fundamental semantic rule of interpretation. It governs constitutions, statutes, rules, and private instruments. Interpreters should not be required to divine arcane nuances or to discover hidden meanings.” – Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
“In the United States we have what is often called an adversarial system of justice. However, because it is adversarial—as distinct from inquisitorial—it is sometimes easy to forget that the purpose of the system is not to hold a contest for its own sake. The purpose of our system of justice is the orderly ascertainment of the truth and the application of the law to that truth. Just because a court must rely on fallible litigants to present competent evidence does not vitiate the fundamental purpose of the proceeding, which is most assuredly not to have a contest but to establish what actually happened. The adversarial system works not because it is a contest to see who has the cleverest lawyer but because allowing two or more sides to present evidence to a neutral decisionmaker is an epistemologically sophisticated way to get at the truth. And while certain aspects of the law, namely the fact that there are fixed rules and outcomes, allow it to be analogized to a game, it is most definitely not a spectator sport.” – Presiding Judge Sills, Guardianship of Simpson, November 10, 1998 (internal cites and quotations omitted)
“Congress may impose penalties in aid of the exercise of any of its enumerated powers. The power of taxation, granted to Congress by the Constitution, may be utilized as a sanction for the exercise of another power which is granted it.” – Associate Justice William O. Douglas, Sunshine Anthracite Coal Co. v. Adkins, 310 U.S. 381 (1940)
“The city holds all property which it owns as trustee for the public, although certain classes or kinds of property, such as the public streets, the public squares, the courthouse, and the jail cannot be taken on execution against it, for reasons which are plain to be seen. Such property is so necessary for the present and daily use of the city as the representative of the public, as well as for the use of the public itself, that to allow it to be taken on execution against the city would interfere so substantially with the immediate wants and rights of the public whose trustee the city is, and also with the due performance of the duties which are imposed upon the city by virtue of its incorporation, that it ought not to be tolerated. Other property which the city might hold, not being so situated, might be taken on execution against it, but it nevertheless holds that very property as trustee. It holds it for the purpose of discharging in a general way the duties which it owes to the public—that is, to the inhabitants of the city. The citizens or inhabitants of a city, not the common council or local legislature, constitute the ‘corporation’ of the city. The corporation as such has no human wants to be supplied. It cannot eat or drink or wear clothing or live in houses. It must as to all its property be the representative or trustee of somebody or of some aggregation of persons, and it must therefore hold its property for the same use, call that use either public or private. It is a use for the benefit of individuals. A municipal corporation is the trustee of the inhabitants of that corporation, and it holds all its property in a general and substantial, although not in a strictly technical, sense in trust for them. They are the people of the state inhabiting that particular subdivision of its territory, a fluctuating class constantly passing out of the scope of the trust by removal and death and as constantly renewed by fresh accretions of population. The property which a municipal corporation holds is for their use, and is held for their benefit. Any of the property held by a city does not belong to the mayor, or to any or all of the members of the common council, nor to the common people as individual property. If any of those functionaries should appropriate the property or its avails to his own use, he would be guilty of embezzlement, and if one of the people not clothed with official station should do the like, he would be guilty of larceny. So we see that whatever property a municipal corporation holds, it holds it in trust for its inhabitants—in other words, for the public—and the only difference in the trust existing in the case of a public highway or a public square and other cases is that, in the one case, the property cannot be taken in execution against the city, while in other cases, it may be. The right of the city is less absolute in the one case than in the other, but it owns all the property in the same capacity and character as a corporation, and in trust for the inhabitants thereof.” – Unites States Supreme Court Associate Justice Rufus W. Peckham, Werlein v. New Orleans, 177 U.S. 390 (1900)
“At the very core of the Fourth Amendment stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. A warrantless search is the quintessential intrusion and is presumptively unreasonable. The government can rebut that presumption by showing that the police, despite lacking a warrant, were permitted to undertake the search by someone with authority. Such consent need not come from the target of the search. It may come from a third party who possesses common authority over the premises or effects sought to be inspected. Common authority does not refer to some kind of technical property interest. It arises simply from mutual use of the property by persons generally having joint access or control for most purposes, so that it is reasonable to recognize that any of the co-inhabitants has the right to permit the inspection in his own right and that the others have assumed the risk that one of their number might permit the common area to be searched. Even a person who does not actually use the property can authorize a search if it is reasonable for the police to believe she uses it. Such apparent authority is sufficient to sustain a search because the Fourth Amendment requires only that officers’ factual determinations in such situations always be reasonable, not that they always be correct.” – United States of America v. Davon Peyton (internal quotes and cites omitted)
“The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.” – Richard A. Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism”
“A tax is not an assessment of benefits. It is a means of distributing the burden of the cost of government. The only benefit to which the taxpayer is constitutionally entitled is that derived from his enjoyment of the privileges of living in an organized society, established and safeguarded by the devotion of taxes to public purposes. Any other view would preclude the levying of taxes except as they are used to compensate for the burden on those who pay them, and would involve the abandonment of the most fundamental principle of government—that it exists primarily to provide for the common good.” – Justice Garman, Arangold Corp. v. Zehnder, 204 Ill. 2d 142 (Ill. 2003) (internal cites and quotations omitted).
“Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who
usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances. A number of
psychological concepts explain why abusive behavior occurs. These concepts include:
Deindividuation. Deindividuation is a process whereby the anonymity, suggestibility, and contagion provided in a crowd allows individuals to participate in behavior marked by the temporary suspension of customary rules and inhibitions. Individuals within a group may experience reduced self-awareness which can also result in disinhibited behavior.
Groupthink. Individuals often make very uncharacteristic decisions when part of a group. Symptoms of groupthink include: (1) Illusion of invulnerability-group members believe the group is special and morally superior; therefore its decisions are sound; (2) Illusion of unanimity in which members assume all are in concurrence, and (3) Pressure is brought to bear on those who might dissent.
Dehumanization. Dehumanization is the process whereby individuals or groups are viewed as somehow less than fully human. Existing cultural and moral standards are often not applied to those who have been dehumanized.
Enemy Image. Enemy image describes the phenomenon wherein both sides participating in a conflict tend to view themselves as good and peace-loving peoples, while the enemy is seen as evil and aggressive.
Moral Exclusion. Moral exclusion is a process whereby one group views another as fundamentally different, and therefore prevailing moral rules and practices apply to one group but not the other.”
– James R. Schlesinger, et al., Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations
“It is not the role of a federal court to provide comfort to litigants. Federal courts resolve concrete disputes between real adversaries.” – Judge Easterbrook, State Farm Life Ins. Co. v. Troy Jonas
“Perhaps the most striking fact about the organized religious life of the colonials in the eighteenth century is the large number of people who were left out of it. Whether they had lost their faith before migrating or had been torn loose from church life in the business of moving, or whether they resented the authority of the dutiful ministers or the loose ways of the less dutiful, or were lost through the inability of the churches to establish viable church-community life in the open spaces and diffused settlements of America, surprisingly large numbers in the English continental colonies enjoyed little or none of the amenities and comforts of a religious community, and many seemed not to be trying very hard to get them. America has always liked to dwell upon those who came to win religious liberty or to realize some other religious ideal. But the extraordinary number who were content to live either without organized religion or with only a weak or a token relation to it suggests the majority of white colonials may have come for very mundane reasons—not to reach the glories of the other world but to relieve the hardships of this.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“The ideal of the simple yeoman living close to nature, applying himself with loving care to the soil, and supplying virtually all his modest needs with his own labor and that of his family was an ideal first of the educated elite who read pastoral poetry and later of agrarian ideologues and politicians who wanted to claim a moral superiority for the farmer. It was never an ideal of the yeoman farmers themselves. They might pride themselves on being able to meet the demands of self-sufficiency, but they were in haste to get out of their original lean-tos and log cabins into comfortable frame houses which they might hope to furnish with a respectable share of the world’s comforts.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“The English colonies of the North American mainland, the rude provinces that would in time form the nucleus of the United States, were the elements of the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist enterprise. This was the transcendentally important reality about this new country.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“Contrary to the State’s argument that it has discretion to charge whatever and whomever it desires, the separation of powers doctrine does not justify depriving a person of his or her constitutional rights.” – Judge J. Bustamante, State of New Mexico v. Mark Rendleman, et al.
“WANTED POSTER – Jesse Woodson James: five feet eleven inches tall, brown hair, regulation killer-blue eyes. In photographs appears to be considering shooting the photographer. Does not test out well. Approaches casual strangers in an intimate way and interferes massively in their private lives. Is trapped in the dead hole and neither moves nor changes. Steals horses. Inhabits a discolored landscape through which only one, treacherous path is known to pass. Has the appearance of many ballistics with a flat trajectory. This man is occupied by an army of scars, tip of middle finger left hand missing, and one large scar on chest which oft has spoken with bloody lips. Is always breaking out afresh. Cultivates a desperado aura and can most often be seen in the penny dreadfuls, spotted regularly in novels, poems, ballads, and folktales. Men claiming to be James can be differentiated from him in that they pose willingly in front of cameras, they make political speeches. These people are not the genuine article and are confused. Jess James was never confused about anything in his life, which will last exactly thirty-seven years, five months, three days, fourteen hours, and ten minutes.” – Paulette Jiles, “The James Poems”
“When you get elected President I think the first thing they do is take you in a room and say you know you’re not gonna do shit. Your hands are tied and Congress have the whole thing locked down and we all get screwed.” – Willie Nelson (interviewed by Martin Chilton in Telegraph Music, 2012)
“Judges must keep in mind that poverty is not a crime; it is a condition, and every day presents a struggle for the poor to survive, to cope, to get by until tomorrow. When one is poor, drifting into petty crime can become an option, despite its undeniable risks.” – Justice Michael B. Hyman, The People of the State of Illinois v. Harley Busse (Illinois Appellate Court, First District, December 17, 2016)
“If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law”
“No well ordered society can leave to the individuals an absolute right to make final decisions, unassailable by the State, as to everything they will or will not do.” – Justice Hugo Lafayette Black and Justice William Orville Douglas, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“Free public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction.” – Chief Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
“It is the policy of the circuit to avoid issuing unnecessary opinions.” — Circuit Rule 32.1(a), Circuit Rules of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit