John Mortimer Quotes
Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.
Mortimer, John. Rumpole of the Bailey. Penguin Books, 1978, p. 88.
Most Americans would with this characterized their own judges. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
Others argue that the prosecutors are the weakest link in the system. See {631696}.
This is a very important and fundamental quotation. Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay and many other Founding Fathers told us that the jury of peers was the final arbiter of a court case. However, many modern judges and legislatures have tried to erode that principle. In most states judges instructs juries that they are the final arbiter of the facts but he/she is the final arbiter of the law and how it should be applied in the case. But the founders wanted the jury to be the final arbiters of the law as well as the facts as is illustrated here and in {640588} and {640589}. For a more modern concurring view, see {640590}
This was the most eloquent acknowledgement of the import and difficult job of the Federal Disctrict Judges--the backbone of the Federal Judiciary who are oftetn over looked in favor of the appellate judges and Supreme Court judges who deal with cases as a group and always have the privelege of reviewing and second guessing the work of the district judges who first had to decide the issue on way or the other.
Sir John Clifford Mortimer CBE QC FRSL was an English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter, and author.
