top of page
.png){kind=small}
"When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it."
Standard
Customized
Explore more quotes by Sandra Day O'Connor
"My hope is that 10 years from now, after I've been across the street at work for a while, they'll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote."
"The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried."
"Justice Ginsburg is a very competent justice, and it is a joy to have her on the court, but particularly for me it is a pleasure to have a second woman on the court."
"The members of the court were just delighted to have a ninth member - male or female. They were all kind and welcoming."
"It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution."
"I'm a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it's terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don't like."
"It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself."
"If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is."
"What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful."
Exlpore more Court quotes
"This is a man who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in three years, editor of the Harvard Law Review, argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court."
"The members of the court were just delighted to have a ninth member - male or female. They were all kind and welcoming."
"Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has."
"I would not like to be the only woman on the court."
"In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked."
"In reality, those rare few cases with good forensic evidence are the ones that make it to court."
bottom of page