American Judge Quotes

"Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances."

"Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom."

"Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values."

"Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person."

"Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents."

"I don't know that there are any short cuts to doing a good job."

"I need to retire from retirement."

"I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases."

"I wanted to be a cattle rancher when I was young, because it was what I knew and I loved it."

"I'm a judge. It seemed to me that it was critical to try to take action to stem the criticism and help people understand that in the constitutional framework, it's terribly important not to have a system of retaliation against decisions people don't like."

"If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is."

"Justice Ginsburg is a very competent justice, and it is a joy to have her on the court, but particularly for me it is a pleasure to have a second woman on the court."

"Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has."

"My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move."

"My sense is that jurists from other nations around the world understand that our court occupies a very special place in the American system, and that the court is rather well regarded in comparison, perhaps, to their own."

"Occasionally we have to interpret an international treaty - one, perhaps, affecting airlines and liability for injury to passengers or damage to goods. Then, of course, we have to look to the precedents of other member nations in resolving issues."

"Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability."

"The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried."

"The fact is, we are a nine-member court that sits on cases."

"The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation."