Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Neal Katyal - Page 2

It's definitely true that law enforcement investigations expand over time in appropriate ways.

Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.

The nice thing about the 'House of Cards' is they did 70 takes, so it was a little different. You only get one at the Supreme Court.

Every time a president invokes executive privilege, there are three relevant audiences he has to think about: the courts, Congress, and the public.

I don't think that the Supreme Court really takes cases with kind of a theme in mind. They get about 10,000 requests a year, and what are called 'petitions for certiorari,' which are essentially 30 page documents which say, 'Hey, Court, hear my case.' And they don't take very many of them.

One of our Constitution's greatest virtues is that it looks to judges as a source of reasoned, practical, rights-minded decision making.

Americans can tolerate some secrecy, particularly when it is rooted in protection of the public's interests. But when the claims appear to hide wrongdoing, they begin to curdle.

In 2006, I argued and won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a Supreme Court case that struck down President George W. Bush's use of military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.

Many programs are built on the government's spending power, and the existence of an extraconstitutional limit on that power is a worrisome development.

Institutionalizing dissent in our agencies moves us toward a healthier democracy and helps fulfill our founders' vision.

Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don't even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so.

Merrick Garland was the most qualified nominee, not just in our lifetimes but perhaps in the history of the United States Supreme Court. The chief judge of the D.C. Circuit for 20 years, the nation's second-highest court. Never once been overruled by the Court in his 20 years. He was extraordinary.

One thing we know about government after the New Deal is that checks and balances through whistle-blowing is terrible policy.

Unanimity is important because it signals that the justices can rise above their differences and interpret the law without partisanship.

I didn't go to fancy schools or come from money or from a family that valued law or public speaking in any shape or form.

Everything having to do with President Trump and Russia, whether it is Mr. Trump's demand for an investigation into the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, or whether Mr. Trump will testify, requires an answer to one essential background question: Can Mr. Mueller seek to indict the president?

Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can't ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission.

The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.

People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly.

My parents wanted to keep me away from girls, so they sent me to a Catholic boy's school, the Loyola Academy in Chicago.

There is no doubt that dissents can serve a useful role by explaining when a justice thinks the majority has gone off the deep end. But unanimity also sends its own powerful message - one that might be eclipsed in the headlines by a sensational dissent but could ultimately have a greater impact.

In general, presidents do sit for interviews or respond to requests from prosecutors because they take their constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws seriously, and running away from a prosecutor isn't consistent with faithfully executing the laws.

The Supreme Court is very capable of acting quickly when it needs to.

Our constitutional system is defined by a balance between the public's need for transparency and the government's need to have a zone of secrecy around decision making. Both are important, yet they are mutually exclusive.