Ben Sasse Quotes

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

Judges ought to remember that their office is Ius dicere and not Ius dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

In the legislative branch, you make the laws... and our role as judges is to interpret the law, not to inject our own policy preferences. So our task is to give an honest construction to what laws are passed by the Legislature.

Judges should always behave judicially by adjudicating, never politically by legislating. I leave policy to policymakers. They're preeminent, but they're not omnipotent. In other words, lawmakers decide if laws pass, but judges decide if laws pass muster.

Judges should decide legal disputes. Judges should not make law.

I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.

Though in many other countries everything is left in the breast of the Judge to determine, yet with us he is only to declare and pronounce, not to make or new-model the law.

I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed.

Constitutions are interpreted differently from statutes.

As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

It is not the responsibility of the judiciary to amend poor legislative drafting, even if judges would personally prefer a different outcome than what is required by a statute's text.

Judges should interpret the laws according to what they say, not according to what the judges wish they would say. Judges are supposed to interpret the laws; they are not supposed to make them.

The Declaration of Independence...is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people.

Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It's how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors.

We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside. The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body…. Judges who will bring to the Courts a present-day sense of the Constitution - Judges who will retain in the Courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject the legislative powers which the courts have today assumed.

Remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law but to interpret and apply it

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

I say that the responsibility of the judiciary is to uphold the Constitution, not rewrite it.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them.

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.