Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Common sense often makes good law.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which is perfection of reason.

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.

A first principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence is that the ends do not justify the means.

The lawyers want to govern us by the common law of England. Trust me for it, common sense is a much safer guide for us.

Judges have been deciding cases without regard for the law ever since King Solomon ruled that the contending parties should split the baby.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason....

Bad facts make bad law.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

Let's create a legal system that can work.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

I took the position from day one that it was the right decree, that the modifications I made to the decree were proper, that the correct outcome had been obtained, and that in due time all of that would become apparent. And it has become apparent.

Law is vulnerable to the winds of intellectual or moral fashion, which it then validates as the commands of our most basic concept.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

My feeling is that the judge has a responsibility to the Constitution first, precedent second. Precedent is one factor. It is not the only factor. If it was the only factor, then, you know, we wouldn't have had Roe vs. Wade. We wouldn't have had Griswold. We wouldn't have had Lawrence. We wouldn't have had all these cases which the Left love.

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principles afterward.

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.

Measured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs, too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable.

It is very important to know the law, but it is more important to know the judge