May I suggest a possible replacement:
http://www.neoperspectives.com/janicerogersbrown.htm
California Supreme Court Justice, Janice Rogers Brown, was confirmed to the DC court of appeals. It is my sincere hope that she is nominated to the Supreme Court, especially as Chief Justice. Janice Rogers Brown is one of the most inspiring examples of American Liberty that exists today. I intend to follow her opinions closely and expand this portion of the site in the future.
Fifty Ways to Loose your Freedom [hyperlink]
8/12/00 Institute for Justice
"A Whiter Shade of Pale": Sense and Nonsense —The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics [hyperlink]
4/20/00 Federalist Society
The public school system is already so beleaguered by bureaucracy; so cowed by the demands of due process; so overwhelmed with faddish curricula that its educational purpose is almost an afterthought.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Where government advances - and it advances relentlessly - freedom is imperiled, community impoverished, religion marginalized and civilization itself jeopardized.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse - whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism - has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of our Constitution and the character of our people.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Where once government was a necessary evil because it protected private property, now private property is a necessary evil because it funds government programs.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
We no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable. Indeed, the majority's zeal is more than a little endearing. There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Government is the only enterprise in the world which expands in size when its failures increase.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
And most significantly, if we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a Kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
My grandparents' generation thought being on the government dole was a disgraceful, a blight on the family honor. Today's senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right 'free' stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Freedom and Democracy are not synonymous. <.> The idea of a constitutional government is deceptively simple: the government cannot legitimately infringe upon our rights, even if the majority votes to do so. <.> Individual liberty cannot be preserved if the majority's will must always triumph.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Freedom and Democracy are not synonymous. Indeed, one of the grave errors of American foreign policy is that merely installing the forms of a regime like ours, without its foundation - will automatically lead to freedom, stability, and prosperity.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
[Natural Law] It provided potent incentive to reflection, the touchtone of existing institutions, the justification for conservatism, as well as revolution.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
The claim is that a particular perspective serves the general welfare. What is really served is a will to power.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
In the last 100 years we have let the government buy our birthright with our own tax money.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
A court of last resort is supposed to do more than resolve individual differences. Such courts ought to be building for the future, providing guidance, structure, stability - instilling confidence in the primacy of the rule of law. But, alas, the decisions of such courts, including my own, seem ever more ad hoc and expedient, perilously adrift on the roiling seas of feckless photo-op compassion and political correctness. And we are, by and large, captives in an intellectual world that is completely antithetical to the kinds of substantial limits an authentic historical interpretation of our constitution would impose. We are committed to doing the right thing. But with only our feelings to guide us, most of the time we cannot figure out what the right thing is.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism’s virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance, but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice – including our freedom
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
In truth, liberalism’s vaunted tolerance and openness is a lie. In America, at least, liberalism is tolerant only of those concerns to which it is indifferent.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
[T]he courts overcame these alleged limitations on their powers with ridiculous ease. How? By constitutionalizing everything possible, finding constitutional rights which are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. By taking a few words which are in the Constitution like “due process” and “equal protection” and imbuing them with elaborate and highly implausible etymologies; and by enunciating standards of constitutional review which are not standards at all but rather policy vetoes, i.e., strict scrutiny and the compelling state interest standard.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Politicians in their eagerness to please and to provide something of value to their constituencies that does not have a price tag are handing out new rights like lollipops in the dentist’s office.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of "economic rights," the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new "rights" imposed obligations, not limits, on the state. It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
The right to express one’s individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Government acts as a giant siphon, extracting wealth, creating privilege and power, and redistributing it.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned. A judicial subjectivity whose very purpose was to do away with objective gauges of constitutionality, with universal principles, the better to give the judicial priesthood a free hand to remake the Constitution.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Curiously, in the current dialectic, the right to keep and bear arms – a right expressly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights – is deemed less fundamental than implicit protections the court purports to find in the penumbras of other express provisions.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
We are heirs to a mind-numbing bureaucracy; subject to a level of legalization that cannot avoid being arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory. What other outcome is possible in a society in which no adult can wake up, go about their business, and return to their homes without breaking several laws?
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown
JRB would be excellent !!!