Quotes by Mark Tushnet

“Youd have a fight about this among lawyers,”

“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.”

“[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.”

“The Supreme Court has said Congress does have the power to create new legal interests -- to confer standing on people who otherwise wouldnt have it,”

“Theyre not willing to subject their designation to the scrutiny of any outsider except under an extremely loose standard.”

“[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. Its great.”

“But there are some issues that have simply dropped out of contention,”

“The difficulty with the administrations 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,”

“I dont think his fundamental views changed over the roughly 30 years he was on the court.”

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