The makers of our Constitution … sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy … to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.”
Justice Louis Brandeis,
dissenting in
Olmstead v. United States,
277 U.S. 438,
June 4, 1928
dissenting in
Olmstead v. United States,
277 U.S. 438,
June 4, 1928
3 comments:
Well, Brandeis also wrote four years after that, in his dissent in Burnet v. Coronado Oil and Gas:
…in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right.
Maybe he would say of the present administration's behavior, "It's done. SIt down, and shut up."
Eric Hines
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy...
If only we could accept such a gracious invitation. :)
Fire dog lake is like that final dungeon people see in RPGs. You only go there when you are well equipped and ready to exterminate evil.
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