Top 35 Linda Greenhouse Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The examples center around the existence of a conflict among the lower federal courts or the state courts on “an important federal question.”

— Linda Greenhouse

2. “It was therefore understandable, Dahl said, “that the policy views dominant on the Court are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States.”

— Linda Greenhouse

3. “Marbury v. Madison, the Marshall Court’s best-known case, and one of the most famous in Supreme Court history, was decided early in the chief justice’s tenure, on February 24, 1803. It grew out of the tense and messy transition of power from the Adams Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans after the election of 1800.”

— Linda Greenhouse

4. “He sought a writ of mandamus, a judicial order commanding the delivery of his commission. It seemed a readily available remedy, because Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789 had explicitly provided that citizens could go directly to the Supreme Court to seek a writ of mandamus against a federal official.”

— Linda Greenhouse

5. “As Burbank points out, relations between the branches are governed as much by norms and customs as by formal structures. The Constitution permits Congress to impeach and remove federal judges, for example, but the norm is that impeachment is reserved for criminal behavior or serious ethical lapses, and not for judicial rulings with which members of Congress disagree.”

— Linda Greenhouse

6. “The Ledbetter episode came and went quickly. It is entirely predictable that other discrete disputes over the intent of Congress and the meaning of federal statutes will similarly come and go in the future. But there exists a more profound constitutionally-based struggle between the Court and Congress over the boundaries of congressional lawmaking authority, with origins deep in the country’s history.”

— Linda Greenhouse

7. “We all rely on public confidence and trust to give the courts’ decisions their force,” Justice O’Connor said in a lecture on “public trust as a dimension of equal justice.” She explained: “We don’t have standing armies to enforce opinions, we rely on the confidence of the public in the correctness of those decisions. That’s why we have to be aware of public opinions and of attitudes toward our system of justice, and it is why we must try to keep and build that trust.”

— Linda Greenhouse

8. “It was in the circuit courts that the justices fleshed out some important principles of federal law and jurisdiction. One such instance came in 1792 in Hayburn’s Case.”

— Linda Greenhouse

9. “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity,” is how O’Connor summarized the core of the argument for the law school’s position. She left little doubt that she had been persuaded not only.”

— Linda Greenhouse

10. “The justices whose behavior provoked the Roosevelt court-packing plan were criticized from the Left; the Warren Court from the Right; and the Roberts Court, to a somewhat more modulated degree, from the Left again.”

— Linda Greenhouse

11. “The struggle between the Court and the president, dramatically present in cases growing out of the Bush administration’s response.”

— Linda Greenhouse

12. “For the Supreme Court specifically, Article III makes a distinction between “original” and “appellate” jurisdiction – between the Supreme Court as a court of first resort for cases involving states or foreign diplomats, and the Court as the recipient of appeals from lower courts in all other cases.”

— Linda Greenhouse

13. “Once the Constitution was ratified, Congress quickly turned to the task of setting up a court system within the Article III framework. The Judiciary Act of 1789, often called the First Judiciary Act, established two tiers of lower courts: thirteen district courts that followed state lines, each with its own district judge, and three circuit courts, for the Eastern, Middle, and Southern Circuits.”

— Linda Greenhouse

14. “During its first two terms, February and August 1790, it had almost nothing to do. A year after its first session, the Court finally received its first case, but the case settled before argument. Six months later, in August 1791, the Court received a second case, an appeal in a commercial dispute.”

— Linda Greenhouse

15. “But the Judiciary Act did not provide for judges to staff the circuit courts. Instead, the circuits would be staffed during their two annual sittings by two Supreme Court justices and one district judge.”

— Linda Greenhouse

16. “Two periods sixty years apart provide bookends to an account of deep conflict between the political branches and the Supreme Court in the modern era. The first was the struggle over the New Deal.”

— Linda Greenhouse

17. “In addition to institutional embarrassment in many quarters, there was a particular irony to this failure of information. The Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence depends to a considerable measure on the justices’ assessment of public opinion as reflected in statutes. A punishment that is demonstrably “unusual” is deemed constitutionally problematic.”

— Linda Greenhouse

18. “This was the inauspicious background for the nomination by John Adams of John Marshall, his secretary of state, to be the nation’s fourth chief justice. Marshall, a Virginian and combat veteran of the Revolutionary War, was forty-five years old, until this day the youngest person ever to assume the office.”

— Linda Greenhouse

19. “The political scientist Robert A. Dahl observed more than a half century ago that the Supreme Court “is an essential part of the political leadership,” part of the “dominant political alliance.”

— Linda Greenhouse

20. “During the 1980s, however, the Court came under increasing pressure to repudiate Roe v. Wade. First the Reagan administration and then the administration of President George H. W. Bush asked the Court to overturn the decision, on five separate occasions. In 1980 the Republican party’s platform had called for the first time for the appointment of judges “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”

— Linda Greenhouse

21. “Justice Ginsburg objected that the context was in fact crucially different. She said that while termination and failure to hire or promote are public acts, easily ascertained, employees of most private companies have no way of knowing what their fellow workers are being paid.”

— Linda Greenhouse

22. “Opinions are announced in open court immediately before the start of the day’s arguments. The justice who has written the majority opinion delivers a brief summary. A dissenting justice who feels particularly strongly might follow with a summary of the dissent. The statements that justices make from the bench are not part of the official opinion, but the few points that a justice might choose to emphasize from a long opinion can be illuminating for those present.”

— Linda Greenhouse

23. “Although the delegates appear to have assumed that the federal courts would exercise some form of judicial review over federal and state laws, Article III says nothing explicit on the subject. It states in broad terms that the federal courts’ judicial power “shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties.”

— Linda Greenhouse

24. “To the extent that it conveys the image of the three branches of the federal government, each operating in its own sphere, the phrase “separation of powers” is misleading. A more accurate image is one of dynamic interaction, in which the Supreme Court is an active participant.”

— Linda Greenhouse

25. “The case was a suit by a merchant in South Carolina against the state of Georgia for a Revolutionary War debt. The plaintiff sued directly in the Supreme Court under the provision of Article III that gave the Court jurisdiction over suits between a state and a citizen of a different state. The Court rejected Georgia’s argument that as a sovereign state it was immune from suit without its consent. When Georgia refused to appear, the Court entered a default judgment against it.”

— Linda Greenhouse

26. “The convention debated at length over how the members of the Supreme Court should be selected, eventually settling on nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate. By providing that federal judges “shall hold their offices during good Behaviour,” the delegates intended to protect judicial independence.”

— Linda Greenhouse

27. “Section 13 of the Judiciary Act, in which Congress gave the Court jurisdiction to decide original mandamus actions like Marbury’s, was therefore unconstitutional and no mandamus could be issued. The decision gave the Court a measure of insulation at a time of political turmoil; without an order, the Jefferson administration had nothing to complain about.”

— Linda Greenhouse

28. “The justices heard arguments, but then declared that a procedural irregularity in the appeal barred them from proceeding to a decision. Not until 1792 did the Supreme Court begin issuing opinions.”

— Linda Greenhouse

29. “This early rejection of an advisory role established a lasting principle: that the federal courts have the constitutional power to decide only those questions that arise in the context of disputes between opposing parties.”

— Linda Greenhouse

30. “The decision’s significance, of course, lay in the Court’s assertion of authority to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Marshall declared – a line that the Court has invoked throughout its history, down to the present. In the guise of modestly disclaiming authority to act, the Court had assumed for itself great power.”

— Linda Greenhouse

31. “And yet, over time, the Court and the public seem to maintain a certain equilibrium. Public opinion polls regularly reflect that “diffuse” approval for the Supreme Court – that is, approval of the institution in general, rather than of particular actions – is higher than for other institutions of government.”

— Linda Greenhouse

32. “Even today, the contours of what is often referred to as the “Article III jurisdiction” of the federal courts remain contested. The important points here are simply these: that questions concerning the federal courts’ jurisdiction are anchored deeply in the nation’s constitutional origins, and that the Supreme Court itself has provided the answers.”

— Linda Greenhouse

33. “The Court’s exercise of judicial review is an ever-present and renewable source of interbranch tension. While the court-stripping efforts were responses to the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings, Congress pushes back regularly and more productively against the Court’s statutory decisions. In the early 1990s, Congress responded sharply to the Court’s rightward turn in a series of civil rights cases decided several years earlier.”

— Linda Greenhouse

34. “While it is unlikely that the size of the Court will ever change again, some scholars, troubled by the increasing length of service on the Court and the advanced age at which justices retire, have recently put forward a proposal that would add new justices, move the oldest into a senior status, and assign the Court’s active work to the most junior nine.”

— Linda Greenhouse

35. “By statute, a Supreme Court term begins on the first Monday of every October. But the justices’ active labor actually begins the week before, on the last Monday of September, when they meet in conference to consider the cert petitions that have accumulated over the summer months of recess.”

— Linda Greenhouse

36. “Between 1799 and 1810 the legislatures of New Jersey, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania passed statutes forbidding the state courts from citing any cases decided by English courts after July 4, 1776.”

— Linda Greenhouse

37. “As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges.”

— Linda Greenhouse