Hugo Black Justice Quotations

Chief justices come and go, ... Some are more influential than others because they are greater lawyers. Sometimes chief justices are more influential than others because they have a talent for that.

Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the constitution but freedom to continue to prevent others from publishing is not.

From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law. This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.

What finally emerges from the 'clear and present danger' cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished...It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation.

There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.