Justice & Law Quote by Byron White

White’s line has the clipped, almost dry menace of a Justice warning his colleagues: if you turn substantive due process into a morality detector, you won’t just reshape constitutional law, you’ll drown the courts in it. The joke isn’t funny, exactly, but it’s a lawyer’s version of one - a pointed exaggeration meant to expose a slippery standard. If “moral choices” are suspect, then nearly everything legislators do becomes suspect, because law is never just traffic engineering. It’s always smuggling in values about harm, responsibility, family, sex, drugs, risk, dignity.

The specific intent is institutional: defend the legitimacy of democratic lawmaking and cabin judicial power. White is pushing back against a certain strain of due process reasoning that treats contested social norms as automatically unconstitutional just because they’re moralized. His premise is almost procedural humility: courts are not built to referee moral philosophy at scale, and the Constitution doesn’t license them to strike down every statute with a whiff of ethical judgment.

The subtext is also a rebuke to what critics call “Lochnerizing” - the move where judges convert personal or elite moral intuitions into constitutional mandates. White’s “busy indeed” is a warning about incentives: once litigants learn that moral content is a vulnerability, every criminal ban and regulatory scheme becomes a due process challenge.

Contextually, this is White the institutionalist, often skeptical of expansive substantive due process, uneasy with courts becoming the primary engine of social change. He’s not denying that morality shapes law; he’s insisting that this fact can’t be the tripwire that detonates democratic authority.