Morris Raphael Cohen Quotes

Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,- that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances.

The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.

History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.

When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.

Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions.

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.

Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.

The law rarely hesitates in declaring its own meaning; but the Judges are frequently puzzled to find out the meaning of others.

Please remember that law and sense are not always the same.

You just never know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

Judges should be in the business of declaring what the law is using the traditional tools of interpretation, rather than pronouncing the law as they might wish it to be in light of their own political views.

I think it's important for the American people to know that the position of originalism isn't itself an originalist position.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

We do not need a heavy theoretical thumb on the scales. What's important is how the traditional sources of law and legal interpretation - text, structure, history, canons of interpretation, precedent, and other well-established tools of the judicial craft - are prioritized, weighted, and applied.

I think justices of all stripes agree that stare decisis is important, but not an inextricable command. It's not inflexible; it's not absolute.

I am often asked what it was like to be a woman clerking for Justice Scalia. 'Much like being a man clerking for him' is my easy answer. Justice Scalia believed in one simple principle: That law came to the court as an 'is,' not an 'ought.'

I do not believe there are any circumstances in which a judge should consider his or her own values or policy preferences in determining what the law means.

Good lawyering is usually cerebral and impersonally. You can convince a judge with a mastery of facts, detail, and precedent - not a story from the gut about how you feel a certain way.

An essential function of the Court is to revise incorrect or outdated prior rulings. Over the last century, the Court has overruled itself about twice a year—roughly the same rate at which the Court has overturned acts of Congress.

I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.

Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.

Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.