Mark Tushnet Quotations

When you put the memo together with his voting registration challenges and with his opposition to a local antidiscrimination ordinance in Phoenix, ... you get a picture of somebody for whom issues of racial justice and nondiscrimination were not a high priority.

When the history of the Supreme Court in the 20th century is written, there will be two great chief justices: Earl Warren and William Rehnquist. Both presided over courts that changed the law in a very dramatic way.

Sen. Specter's position is that Congress is creating the interest in ensuring that its powers are respected, which is injured when the court's rule against them, ... And so given that interest and injury, his argument is they have standing to intervene.

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

I don't think his fundamental views changed over the roughly 30 years he was on the court.

He was working for the people of the United States.

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

I think he'd look back and say his greatest disappointment was his inability to lead the court to overrule Roe V. Wade.

There's likely to be more informality in the memos, which will be more revealing of Roberts' cast of mind, ... There may also be advocacy of positions that were rejected.

The Supreme Court has said Congress does have the power to create new legal interests -- to confer standing on people who otherwise wouldn't have it,

They really did reshape the law in significant ways. So, in some ways, he doesn't need to be as hard-edged now as when he started. He has accomplished a lot, so it's less urgent for him to be pressing hard for change.

They're not willing to subject their designation to the scrutiny of any outsider except under an extremely loose standard.

It's one thing for people to know what your voice is and another to know what you look like.

He and his colleagues opened a number of doors that the next court can choose to walk through or not, ... Those doors weren't opened before he arrived.

You'd have a fight about this among lawyers,

The court has gotten more conservative as the country has, but individual members of the court haven't changed certainly not Rehnquist. The court and the country changed around him.

The difficulty with the administration's 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,