Aaron Burr Quotes

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principles afterward.

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

How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.

It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law. It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

It cannot be assumed that equity was following common law whenever they agreed, any more than the converse.

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

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

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.

They had to make their own laws in accordance with the necessities of time, and circumstances, the state of affairs, and the experience of judges.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

Bad facts make bad law.

The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of the law, the courts of justice. Every new case is an experiment, and if the accepted rule which seems applicable yields a result which is felt to be unjust, the rule is reconsidered.

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases.

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

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

We both permit and desire that the laws of foreign nations shall be studied for the sake of the useful knowledge that may be obtained from them, but we reject and prohibit their employment in the business of the courts.

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.

We don't pay judges to think; we pay judges to rule on the law.

It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.