Matthew Bacon Quotes

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

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

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.

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.

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.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

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.

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

Bad facts make bad law.

The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of the law, the courts of justice. Every new case is an experiment, and if the accepted rule which seems applicable yields a result which is felt to be unjust, the rule is reconsidered.

It cannot be assumed that equity was following common law whenever they agreed, any more than the converse.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

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

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

Law is largely crystallized custom.

Supreme court opinions should be written in such a way that they can be read in the barber shop.

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

Political reasons have not the requisite certainty to afford rules of judicial interpretation.

[In drafting legislation:] There is no magic bullet to prevent judicial mistakes.

Constitutions are interpreted differently from statutes.

Law is the prophecy of what a court will do.