Felix Frankfurter Quotes

Let's create a legal system that can work.

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.

I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.

In the criminal justice community, as a judge, being tough is not enough. You have to be fair.

Lady Justice doesn't have empathy for anyone. She rules strictly based upon the law, and that's really the only way that our system can function properly under the Constitution.

This is the time that I really miss being in my courtroom because I believe that that's the last place in this country where there's supposed to be fairness.

Let's not interfere with justice... Let's let justice speak.

That's the whole point of... of prosecutorial discretion in the judicial system. It's finding a just outcome in an individual case.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

The job of a justice is justice.

Judges shall judge justly, according to the written law and not according to their own judgment.

Justice is incidental to law and order

As to the long time spent on lawsuits, that is due to concern for justice, that judges may not fail in passing correct judgments, by having to give sentence offhand; it is better that they should reflect, and conclude the case more tardily, than that by judging in a hurry they should both injure man and transgress against the Deity, the institutor of justice....

Enforcing the law is not an injustice.

The law itself is on trial in every case as well as the cause before it.

In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

If justice is supposed to be fair, than any justice system you would hope is based on fairness.

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice.

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

The acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice.

Common sense often makes good law.