We . . . refuse to abdicate our constitutional duty when Congress has acted beyond its enumerated Commerce Clause power in mandating that Americans, from cradle to grave, purchase an insurance product from a private company.
Florida v. United States Dept. of Health & Human Services, No. 11-11021 (11th Cir. Aug. 12, 2011) (Dubina, C.J.) (striking
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917).
Today Blawgletter can't resist giving credit for more than one quote to Douglas E. Abrams, who teaches law at the University of Missouri, the show-me state.
Professor Abrams's piece in the July issue of the Texas Bar Journal — What Great Writers Can Teach Lawyers and Judges — highlights such a Great Many pithy comments
Stop wasting your money on antitrust lawyers. Hire patent lawyers instead.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., "The Trustbusters' Last Meal Ticket", The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 16, 2011 (fussing again about those durn antitrust laws).
The training of a nation to fit itself successfully to fulfill the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or two, but of generations.
Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt 38 (2010) (quoting from a speech by the former President at Cairo University on March 9, 1910).
"You must know — " said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed "Fudge!
That statute is obsolete quite!
Let me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends
On an ancient manorial right."
Lewis Carroll, "The Barrister's Dream", The Hunting of the Snark (1874).
(For another obsolete statute, see ruling. If you dare.)
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
Felix Frankfurter, dissenting in Henslee v. Union Planters Nat'l Bank & Trust Co., 355 U.S. 595, 600 (1949), and declining to "compound error" by pushing an earlier decision he had joined in.
Words to live
A lump of bituminous coal.
Thomas Hobbes wrote awhile back that, in the state of nature, "the life of man" tends toward the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Kentuckian Merle Travis translated the Hobbesian view into the brief candle of a bituminous miner. Travis sang:
You load sixteen tons [of hard coal], what do you get? Another