Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.

Were I confirmed as a judge, I would decide cases according to the rule of law beginning to end.

I have 100 percent confidence in the German judicial system.

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.

My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.

The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

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

The law is immoral.

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.

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.

We do not sit like a kadi under a tree dispensing justice according to considerations of individual expediency

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.

Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life.

I always ask my law clerks, in addition to reading all the briefs, including all the amici briefs, that if there's a good law review article, they should bring it to me.

I always look for judges who respect precedent.

I certainly would not vote against a particular judge already in office because of a decision in a case. You may not agree with a judge's decision, but the judge must act within the law.

We're a country of rule of law, and rule of law doesn't move fast, especially in an entity as big the U.S. government.

Courts of law require evidence to go to trial - not opinions from bureaucrats.

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

I’ve chosen not to challenge the rule of law, because in our system there really is no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. When the Supreme Court makes a decision, no matter how strongly one disagrees with it, one faces a choice –are we, in John Adams’ phrase, a nation of laws, or is it a contest made on raw power?

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

I think people know very little, really, about the court, how it works and its history. And both of those things are important in our country, but they're not things that most citizens know much about.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

If the Constitution says that marriage is between a man and woman, then things that are inconsistent with that would be inconsistent with the Constitution.