Learned Hand Quotes

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

Law is largely crystallized custom.

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

Common law is common right.

The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.

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

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

The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Law cannot stand apart from the social changes around it.

The common law of England has been laboriously built around a mythical figure—the figure of the reasonable man.

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 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.

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

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.

A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.

The law of England is a law of liberty .

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.