Alice Koller Quotes

Our entire legal system bets a great deal on the proposition that this ‘adversary’ system is the least imperfect way to develop all the truth: the corollary is that we must look on partisanship not as an evil but as a part of the system's working.

Life as a barrister never was terribly real to me, and courtrooms were always a place of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of course.

The law is agnostic about truth.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

A trial is not a search for truth. It is a contest and, often, one that produces no winners.

I said the first concern of the administration of justice must, of course, be the individual. The second concern is the truth.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

As to the long time spent on lawsuits, that is due to concern for justice, that judges may not fail in passing correct judgments, by having to give sentence offhand; it is better that they should reflect, and conclude the case more tardily, than that by judging in a hurry they should both injure man and transgress against the Deity, the institutor of justice....

We’re not here to secure convictions; we are here to secure justice.

I have faith in the judicial system.

Both sides should demand a speedy trial.

The time has come for professional jurors.

Courtroom dramas can be boring.

I am finally glad to see that the jury is looking at me.

Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

You have been tried by twelve good men and true, not of your peers but as high above you as heaven is of hell, and they have said you are guilty.

The whole idea of equal justice under law means that you've got to play by the rules. It has nothing to do with the underlying subject matter. You just tell the truth.

I will go to what they call a court. Only they call it a court.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's hard to get justice in the real world. It's possible in fiction.

The trial of a case is a three-legged stool - a judge and two advocates.

Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.

Sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly.

Man is unique in creation because he has a sense of justice and truth. We spend billions of dollars each year to set up court systems to see that justice is done, and we build prisons for those who transgress the laws we enact.