Edmund Burke Quotes

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

There's no certainty in the law.

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 largely crystallized custom.

Bad facts make bad law.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

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.

Legal doctrines ... derive meaning and content from the circumstances that gave rise to them and from the purposes they were designed to serve. To these they are bound as is a live tree to its roots

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

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.

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided.

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.

The lawyers want to govern us by the common law of England. Trust me for it, common sense is a much safer guide for us.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

Law is the prophecy of what a court will do.

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 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.

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.

The Saxon laws … decided almost all matters of any doubt amongst them by methods which, however inadequate, were extremely simple. They judged every controversy either by the conscience of the parties, or by the country’s opinion of it, or what they judged an appeal to Providence. They were unwilling to submit to the trouble of weighing contradictory testimonies; and they were destitute of those critical rules by which evidence is sifted, the true distinguished from the false, the certain from the uncertain.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason....

Law is the ultimate science.

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