Robert George Quotes

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

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.

Bad facts make bad law.

Courts do not make the law.

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

If a Statute make use of a Word the meaning of which is well-known at the Common Law, such word shall be taken in the same Sense it was understood at the common 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.

I don't suggest we ought to be able to pressure judges, but we ought to be able to criticize [them] when we think they've made a mistake

A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day when a later decision may possibly correct the error …

It is not hard to prove, that the lawmakers, in all states, have committed more, and more pernicious errors than the judges

Don’t bother interpreting the statute for us: we know it better than you do, for we made it.

The greatest defect in legislative history is its illegitimacy. We are governed not by legislative intention but by laws… the text should control even if the Congress intended a different result

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

The judge has no right to divinations of public opinion which run counter to its last formal expressions.

It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.

You cannot make a perfect law, but you can make a perfectible law.

… it [is] a judge's duty to decide, not to debate.

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.

[…] over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by asserting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discretion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

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.

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.

Good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion.

Cabinet resolutions approving mass releases of terrorists deal a mortal blow to the status of Israel's judges and courts.

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'