Adam Cohen > Quotes

“The rich and powerful are less likely, all other things being equal, to be arrested, convicted, or imprisoned. The poor are, holding everything else constant, more likely to be incarcerated, institutionalized, and sterilized.”
― Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

“The current Court, after years of being carefully constructed in this way, seems more like a political body than a legal one.”
― Adam Cohen, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America

“In his memoirs, Nixon explains why he decided not to contest the Illinois results. He was concerned that a challenge to the legitimacy of a presidential race would have hurt the nation’s standing in the world, he says. Perhaps more sincere was the other reason he gave: his concern that if he did contest the result “[c]harges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”
― Adam Cohen, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley–His Battle for Chicago and the Nation

“Holmes was expressing his deepest values, ones impressed on him from an early age. He had been raised to believe he and his peers were part of a hereditary aristocracy. He had learned from his father that they were part of a special caste whose refined physiognomy set them apart, and whose elevated intellect was “congenital and hereditary.”
― Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

“Dudley and Stephens’s main holding, about the need to defend individual rights in the face of utilitarian calculations, is an important moral and legal touchstone. Dictators have, throughout history, sought to justify atrocities through hedonic calculus. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin insisted that their concentration camps, planned starvations, and other forms of mass murder were a step on the way toward building a better world. There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“Instead of the moral clarity of a prohibition against murder, it allowed people to make their own decisions about whether and when it might be right to kill someone.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“the collective fears of the Anglo-Saxon upper and middle classes about a changing America. Record levels of immigration were transforming the nation’s ethnic and religious makeup. And”
― Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

“The roots of the royal prerogative of mercy lay in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the king of England from 1042 to 1066. The royal prerogative was, according to William Blackstone, the great legal commentator, part of the “power of the Sovereign of his pure grace to show mercy to an offender by mitigating or removing the consequences of conviction.” The power was limited to less serious crimes at first, but over time, it evolved so the monarch could, and often did, use it to overturn death sentences. In some cases, the mercy power was considered to be, according to a legal scholar, “an acknowledgement of the fallibility of the judicial process.”
― Adam Cohen, Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History

“The forces demanding immigration restrictions found a powerful ally in Albert Johnson, the new chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Johnson, a Republican, represented a Tacoma, Washington, district that was seeing an increasing number of Japanese immigrants. The main reason Johnson had come to Congress, he said, was to bring about “a heavy reduction of immigration by any method possible.”
― Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

“Eugenics argued that positive and negative traits were passed down from generation to generation, and with Mendel’s pea plants, Galton and his followers now had, or so they believed, a scientific basis for saying so.”
― Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck