It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each.
— Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison 5 U.S. 137 (1803)
We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.
- President Barack Obama
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
—Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 327 (1937).
[F]or though a Man doth a lawful Thing, yet if any damage do thereby befal[l] another, he shall answer for it, if he could have avoided it.
If (Burden < Cost of Injury × Probability of occurrence), then the accused will not have met the standard of care required.
If (Burden ≥ Cost of injury × Probability of occurrence), then the accused may have met the standard of care.
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
—Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964) (concurring).
