Philip Francis Quotes

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a 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.

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

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

Stare decisis is the policy of the court to stand by precedent;  the term is but an abbreviation of “stare decisis et non quieta movere”--to stand by and adhere to decisions and not disturb what is settled.

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.

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

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

I always look for judges who respect precedent.

Precedents once established are so much positive power.

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.

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

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

The value of a decision as a precedent is very much enhanced by the care with which it has been considered, and if the opinion itself shows that other decisions of the same court, or of other courts upon the same point, have been reviewed and examined, it adds to the value of the decision made on each consideration.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

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

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.

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

Bad facts make bad law.

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.

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