Philo Quotes

Judge [Samuel] Alito, I'll tell you the same thing I told John Roberts. I expect you to adhere to the Code of Judicial Conduct.

What is the use of striving for standards of judicial propriety if [we] condone such lapses! It would have been bad enough if [the magistrate] had been a Gentile; but for a Jew it was unforgivable.

The Republicans or conservatives always, when it comes to judging, when it comes to legalities, always try to do the right thing even if it harms their interests.

You have had indeed a fair trial. It is a shocking thing when a judge of your high office is shown to have betrayed the truth and his honor, and I sentence you to the penitentiary.

They might object to some of my opinions, but they don't object to my behavior as a judge.

…if I should once permit such political considerations to interfere with the administration of justice in this office, where could I stop? If I should once begin to allow my official conduct to be swayed by considerations such as those, I feel it would end by eventually leading me wholly astray.

When it is left entirely to a judge to decide whether he should give place to another he becomes a judge in his case....

Judges shall judge justly, according to the written law and not according to their own judgment.

If you're going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you're probably doing something wrong.

The fascination about being a judge is the same about the duty of being a judge, and that is to ask yourself, Why am I about to rule the way I am about to rule? You must always ask yourself that question.

But I wound like people to think I was an honest judge and a good judge. And I always tried the reach the best result in every case.

I don't think that a Justice should have uppermost in her mind, 'A Democratic president appointed me, so I must leave to be sure that another Democratic president can appoint my successor.'

Most of us tend to be swayed by what we read. Judges are not superhuman. They, too, are mortals. This is why they have to be exceptionally careful in rendering decisions, which cause unintended consequences.

People must be confident that a judge's decisions are determined by the law and only the law. He must be faithful to the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. Fidelity to the Constitution and the law has been the cornerstone of my life and the hallmark of the kind of judge I have tried to be.

If Justice is pictured blindfold, it is because she judges causes, not men, and not because the prime faculty of an arbitrator is lack of discernment.

You can be a career professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and never insist on fairness and justice. That's tragic and that's what we have to change.

As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.

The law is a crude machine at best, and only spits out something approaching justice of its attendants are committed to justice. As lawyering has become less about doing right and more about doing what you can get away with, our standards of acceptable shenanigans-as-usual seem to be in a free fall.

When I became a judge, I stopped being a practicing attorney. And that was a big change in role.The role of a practicing attorney is to achieve a desirable result for the client in the particular case at hand. But a judge can't think that way. A judge can't have any agenda, a judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case and a judge certainly doesn't have a client.

The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government.

How is it appropriate for a judge ever to say that they will choose to see some facts and not others?

Judicial excellence requires candor before confirmation. We are being asked to give the nominee enormous power.

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs.

Neither side is guiltless if its adversary is appointed judge.

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.