George Sutherland Quotes

George Alexander Sutherland was an English-born U.S. jurist and politician. One of four appointments to the Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding, he served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court between 1922 and 1938. As a member of the Republican Party, he also represented Utah in both houses of Congress.

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Sutherland and his family moved to Utah Territory in the 1860s. After attending the University of Michigan Law School, Sutherland established a legal practice in Provo, Utah and won election to the Utah State Senate. Sutherland won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1900 and to the United States Senate in 1905. In Congress, Sutherland supported several progressive policies but generally aligned with the party's conservative wing. He won re-election in 1911 but was defeated in the 1916 election by Democrat William H. King.

Harding successfully nominated Sutherland to the Supreme Court in 1922 to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of Associate Justice John Hessin Clarke. Sutherland made up part of the "Four Horsemen", a group of conservative justices that often voted to strike down New Deal legislation. He retired from the Supreme Court in 1938, and was succeeded by Stanley Forman Reed. Sutherland wrote the Court's majority opinion in cases such as Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., Powell v. Alabama, and U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp.. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. March 1862 – 18. July 1942
George Sutherland photo
George Sutherland: 10   quotes 2   likes

Famous George Sutherland Quotes

“If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.”

Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398, 483 (1934)

George Sutherland Quotes

“For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”

Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 301 U.S. 103, 141 (1937) (dissenting)
Context: Do the people of this land—in the providence of God, favored, as they sometimes boast, above all others in the plenitude of their liberties—desire to preserve those so carefully protected by the First Amendment: liberty of religious worship, freedom of speech and of the press, and the right as freemen peaceably to assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances? If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.

“A nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place — like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”

Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, 388 (1926)

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