Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

Bad facts make bad law.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

Laws are subordinate to custom.

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

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Law. Law. That is what saves nations from the most imminent dangers.

… law as it exists in the modern community may be conveniently, although perhaps not comprehensively, defined as the sum total of all those rules of conduct for which there is state sanction.

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

Our lady the Common Law is a very wise old lady though she still has something to learn in telling what she knows.

The law doesn't create a right.

Law is a bottomless pit.

I'm not interested in culture; I'm interested in the law.

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.

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.

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 lawyers want to govern us by the common law of England. Trust me for it, common sense is a much safer guide for us.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

The law has to be, in part, a teacher.

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.