Dominic Raab Quotes

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.

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

Courts do not make the law.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

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.

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.

… courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws

People expect that the law will be what the Supreme Court told them what the law was going to be.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.

What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law.

The Supreme Court is our ultimate check and balance.

The Supreme Court, when it decides a new legal question, does not make illegal what was previously legal; it gives a final authoritative determination of whether an action was legal when it took place.

All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.

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

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law.

In the United States almost every political question becomes a legal question—or at least a question with legal dimensions.

Legislation and adjudication must follow, and conform to, the progress of society.

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

One single object... will merit the endless gratitude of society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation

I respect, too, the fact that in our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws. It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people's representatives.

Remember when John Roberts was seeking confirmation of the Supreme Court, and he said judges should be just like umpires, just calling balls and strikes? Well, turnabout is fair play. What baseball needs behind the plate are umpires like those judges who are called strict constructionists, which means you follow subtle law to the letter.