David Boies Quotes

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.

The Audio Home Recording Act directly says that noncommercial copying by consumers is lawful.

I think what it was about was the people's right to vote and have those votes counted. And if you think back through our history, an awful lot of what we've fought over, struggled for, is the right of people to vote. That's what the civil-rights movement was, at its bottom, about. At the fundamental level, democracy means a government in which the people vote.

When you think of Napster, you think of music. But the first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole Internet.

Napster's only alleged liability is for contributory or vicarious infringement. So when Napster's users engage in noncommercial sharing of music, is that activity copyright infringement? No.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

It was important for the Supreme Court to say it’s a matter of constitutional law that everyone is equal, to say everyone is entitled to the dignity that comes from being married to the person you love.

It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What's hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.

You never know when you lose a case whether it was because the facts were against you, or because the judges had already made up their minds, or if you could have done something differently.

I was a paper boy, beginning the summer between my fourth-grade and fifth-grade years.

My question is what non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996.

I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.

But I'd say my best boss was Tom Barr, who was a partner at Cravath, Swain & Moore in the 1960s. It's because I learned so much from him.

Obviously Im a lawyer; I like to have cases.