Daily Inspiration Quote by Antonin Scalia

Scalia is doing something sly here: he’s smuggling a civil-libertarian defense of constitutional limits into a law-and-order frame. “There is nothing new” is a rhetorical shrug that doubles as a warning to the impatient. Stop acting surprised, he implies, when rights look inconvenient. A Constitution worth having is designed to frustrate the state, even when the target is plainly guilty. That’s not a bug; it’s the point.

The phrase “insulates the criminality of a few” is carefully chosen. He doesn’t romanticize defendants or pretend bad actors don’t exist. He concedes the hardest case up front: yes, some guilty people benefit. Then he pivots to “privacy of us all,” widening the moral constituency from the despised individual to the ordinary public. The subtext is distrust of government power: if police authority can be expanded whenever the suspect is unsympathetic, that expansion won’t stay neatly contained. It becomes a tool that eventually reaches the rest of us, because enforcement systems don’t run on perfect judgment or perfect restraint.

Contextually, this is Scalia the institutionalist speaking, not Scalia the culture warrior. Across criminal procedure and search-and-seizure fights, he often treated the Fourth Amendment as a structural barrier: rules that sometimes let evidence slip are the price of keeping the state from treating everyone as searchable, trackable, and pre-suspect. The line also anticipates a modern anxiety: surveillance scales. Once “a few” can be monitored without friction, “us all” becomes the default setting.