Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

Spanish legislation is full of the sternest laws, enacted in utter disregard of their contingent and ulterior consequences provided the immediate object in view can be effected.

Whenever there's a bad law, it can be repealed or nullified.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution

[In drafting legislation:] There is no magic bullet to prevent judicial mistakes.

They who make laws may without doubt amend or repeal them.

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

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.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

Constitutional reform is exasperatingly slow.

You cannot make a perfect law, but you can make a perfectible law.

[…] over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by asserting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discretion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

Good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law.

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

If a Statute make use of a Word the meaning of which is well-known at the Common Law, such word shall be taken in the same Sense it was understood at the common Law.

I have never seen the author of a reform bill who was able to predict accurately what would really happen when the bill was passed.

Readiness to change from old law to new law enfeebles the power of the law.

One way for Constitutional change is the fact that [Supreme Court] justices are mortal.

We believe that a society in turmoil cannot be saved through mere legislation.