John Scott Quotes

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

Courts do not make the law.

Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.

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.

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.

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.

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.

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.

I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed.

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

Judge-made law, where there is an absolute government and a lax morality, where there is no bar and no public, is a curse and scandal not to be endured.

Many progressives understand Scalia, and other conservative judges, in crassly political terms - as opponents of affirmative action, abortion, gun control, and campaign finance legislation. But what Scalia cared most about was clear, predictable rules, laid down in advance.

A written constitution guides and directs the application of law in a way utterly unlike oral guidance. It reminds us that the certainty and consistency of legal application is essential.

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.

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.

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

There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on “evolving standards” rather than known rules.

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

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

The president appoints the judges. Your lives and your children's lives can change by all of these appellate court judges who will be appointed who will reinterpret laws, and things can change.

I would like to see more judicial activism because I want to see more laws struck down.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.