Thomas Hardiman Quotes

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.

Courts do not make the law.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.

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

Judges should interpret the laws according to what they say, not according to what the judges wish they would say. Judges are supposed to interpret the laws; they are not supposed to make them.

Courts should interpret the law but leave elected lawmakers to create it.

A judge's role is to ensure that the legislature remains within the limits of its assigned authority under the Constitution. Judges have no authority to second-guess the wisdom of the value judgments and policy choices the legislature has made.

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

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.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them.

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

Judges will have the expounding of those laws when they come before them; and they will no doubt stop the operation of such as shall appear repugnant to the constitution.

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

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

The government will certainly decide for itself on whose counsel they will settle the construction of the laws they are to execute. We are to look at the intention of the Legislature, and to carry it into execution while the lawyers are nibbling at the words of the law.

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.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

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.

Judges should decide legal disputes. Judges should not make law.

A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law.

I believe in enforcing the laws as written by the Legislature, as signed by the governor.

Judges are not members of Congress, they're not state legislators, governors, nor presidents. Their job is not to pass laws, implement regulations, nor to make policy.

We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.

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.