John Roberts Quotes

Slow justice is not justice.

Let's ask ourselves: Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million new lawsuits coursing through the system annually? Is it right that people with disputes come up against staggering expense and delay?.

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.

Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process.

Sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly.

The civil process has become too expensive, time-consuming, and contentious, inhibiting effective access to the courts.

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants.

The legal profession is overrun with money-makers, who regard it only as a business by which money is made, with little or no thought of the quality of the means used. We greatly need many more lawyers who regard the profession as a ministry in the temple of Justice.

A judge's duty is to grant justice, but his practice is to delay it: even those judges who know their duty adhere to the general practice.

A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations .… But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost. It is not to be wondered at that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.

An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.

Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose ...

In the right to vote … Justice should never be too expensive. Justice should never be too slow. Justice should never depend on an army of lawyers sweeping in to help, and that is the situation we have now. We are dependent on the ability to find help whenever we can.

When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.

Do justice fairly, correctly and equitably to churches, widows, orphans, and all others, without fraud, corruption, obstruction or abusive delay.

At some point the law must prevail and the lawyers must go home.

It cannot be too clearly understood that this is not a free country, and it will be an evil day for the legal profession when it is.

We need quick justice and we strong justice. Because what we have right now [The U. S. Justice system] is a joke and a laughing stock.

I believe in the jury system.

Without legal aid, and the dedicated lawyers who deliver it, our system of justice would quite simply collapse.

As a child, I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought lawyers and the law were wonderful. But they are more wonderful, I think, than I had thought.

I can't always say that justice is always done in 'Game of Thrones.' It is not.

Lawsuits take a long time.

I think the legal profession is getting somewhat corrupted. When it comes to lawyers, I think it's kind of a Catch-22. On one hand, there's so much process, procedure and mess caused by the legal profession. But on the other hand, the only way to sort through all that process, procedure and mess is through the legal profession.