There Can Be No Security Where There

A License Cannot Be Revoked Because A Man Is Red-headed Or Because He Was Divorced, Except For A Calling, If Such There Be, For Which Red-headedness Or An Unbroken Marriage May Have Some Rational Bearing. If A State Licensing Agency Lays Bare Its Arbitrary Action, Or If The State Law Explicitly Allows It To Act Arbitrarily, That Is Precisely The Kind Of State Action Which The Due Process Clause Forbids.

Certainly The Affirmative Pursuit Of One's Convictions About The Ultimate Mystery Of The Universe And Man's Relation To It Is Placed Beyond The Reach Of Law. Government May Not Interfere With Organized Or Individual Expressions Of Belief Or Disbelief. Propagation Of Belief - Or Even Of Disbelief - In The Supernatural Is Protected, Whether In Church Or Chapel, Mosque Or Synagogue, Tabernacle Or Meeting-house.

It Would Be A Narrow Conception Of Jurisprudence To Confine The Notion Of "laws" To What Is Found Written On The Statute Books, And To Disregard The Gloss Which Life Has Written Upon It.

It Is Easy To Make Light Of Insistence On Scrupulous Regard For The Safeguards Of Civil Liberties When Invoked On Behalf Of The Unworthy. It Is Too Easy. History Bears Testimony That By Such Disregard Are The Rights Of Liberty Extinguished, Heedlessly At First, Then Stealthily, And Brazenly In The End.

One Is Entitled To Say Without Qualification That The Correlation Between Prior Judicial Experience And Fitness For The Supreme Court Is Zero.