Laurence Tribe: Quotes about silence

Laurence Tribe is American lawyer and law school professor. Explore interesting quotes on silence.

Laurence Tribe: 70 quotes0 likes

“[A]ttempting to organize and give structure to the study of legal silence has been a primary purpose of much of what I have written and taught over the past half-century.”

Laurence Tribe

Soundings and Silences (2016)

“[W]e should beware of "hearing" silences where nearly all readers, setting aside how they would like a particular controversy to end, identify determinative text... "The heart has its reasons," as Pascal famously said, "that reason does not know."”

Laurence Tribe

Good enough. And those heartfelt reasons deserve a hearing. But when they defy reason, the meaning of living by the rule of law is that reason should prevail.
Soundings and Silences (2016)

“There are as many reasons to be silent as there are to speak, and as many ways to hear meaning in the sounds of silence.”

Laurence Tribe

Soundings and Silences (2016)

“[C]onstitutional silences, like silences of other kinds, aren’t just occasional gaps or omissions in an otherwise-seamless design. They’re everywhere and come in as many flavors and varieties as sounds. Ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings are in a sense manifestations of silence.”

Laurence Tribe

Soundings and Silences (2016)

“[T]he "dormant Commerce Clause" [is] a set of unwritten constitutional principles limiting state commercial regulation in the face of congressional silence coupled with the Constitution’s delegation to Congress of the power to regulate interstate commerce.”

Laurence Tribe

Source: Soundings and Silences (2016)

“[M]uch of what our Supreme Court does involves filling in the "great silences of the Constitution"...”

Laurence Tribe

Soundings and Silences (2016)

“"[C]onstitutional silence"... pervades all of constitutional law.”

Laurence Tribe

Soundings and Silences (2016)