Lewis F. Powell Jr. Quotes

Nobody likes going to court.

[The Utopians] have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Most lawyers aren't trial lawyers. Most lawyers, even trial lawyers, don't get their problems solved in a courtroom. We like to go to court. It seems heroic to go to court. We think we're the new, great advocates, better than anything we've seen on TV, and we come home exhilarated by having gone to court.

Trials by the adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood.

When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that 'civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.' The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force.

I'm a recovering lawyer. The practice of law has changed. Every agreement is a fight.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

I've always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it.

Lawyers are like beavers: They get in the mainstream and dam it up.

Litigation solves everything.

The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.

Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.

In India, nobody sues anybody.

Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

300 million Americans every day decide to settle their disputes in courts of law rather than settle them in the streets with sticks and stones.

You always make somebody mad when you decide a lawsuit.

Where matters of dispute are made the subject of arbitration under the forms of law. Human judgment is never unerring, and is rarely regarded as otherwise than wrong by the unsuccessful party in the contest.

Disputes arising out of the application or interpretation of this Treaty shall be resolved by negotiations. Any such disputes which cannot be settled by negotiations shall be resolved by conciliation or submitted to arbitration.

Conflicts that in Sweden and Japan would be solved by quiet consultations … through the bureaucracy are fought out through formal litigation in the American court system.

When I went to law school, I had Roger Fisher for Civil Procedure. I never heard anything about negotiations.

I know from my own experience that lawsuits can be a very slow, wasteful, and needlessly acrimonious way to resolve a problem.

All the judges watched Judge Wapner. All America, at one point or another, watched Judge Wapner.

I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby -- not even money, certainly not my soul.

Why cannot we sit down together with a board of arbitration, honestly state our difficulties and try to work out a sane method of procedure?