I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. – Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

Consequences flow from a justices interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order – Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.