John Marshall Quotes

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

Remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law but to interpret and apply it

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 Supreme Court, when it decides a new legal question, does not make illegal what was previously legal; it gives a final authoritative determination of whether an action was legal when it took place.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

I also believe that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of all federal questions.

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.

The [Supreme] Court did not interpret the Constitution—the court amended it.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

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 make the law.

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.

There's no such thing as judicial supremacy.

The judiciary is entitled to finally resolve a dispute. Not every decision is right.

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

Whether interpreting the Constitution or filling in the blanks of a law or a regulation, every word of the court's opinion can widen or narrow our rights as Americans and either protect us or leave us more vulnerable to any winds that blow.

The Constitution is what the judges say it is.

The proper role of the judiciary is one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it.

A Supreme Court decision does not establish a "supreme law of the land" that is binding on all persons and parts of government, henceforth and forevermore.

We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.

The obligation of any judge is to decide the case before the court, and the nature of the issue presented will largely determine the appropriate scope of the principle on which its decision should rest.

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

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

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