Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet Quotes

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.

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.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

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

One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, today is doctrine.

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law. It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

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

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

The common law of England has been laboriously built around a mythical figure—the figure of the reasonable man.

There is not, in the whole compass of human affairs, so noble a spectacle as that which is displayed in the progress of jurisprudence; where we may contemplate the cautious and unwearied exertion of a succession of wise men, through a long course of ages, withdrawing every case, as it arises, from the dangerous power of discretion, and subjecting it to inflexible rules.

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.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

The law doesn't create a right.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.