Edith Jones Quotes

All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.

If a Statute make use of a Word the meaning of which is well-known at the Common Law, such word shall be taken in the same Sense it was understood at the common Law.

The greatest defect in legislative history is its illegitimacy. We are governed not by legislative intention but by laws… the text should control even if the Congress intended a different result

The Supreme Court, when it decides a new legal question, does not make illegal what was previously legal; it gives a final authoritative determination of whether an action was legal when it took place.

Constitutions are interpreted differently from statutes.

In the United States almost every political question becomes a legal question—or at least a question with legal dimensions.

Don’t bother interpreting the statute for us: we know it better than you do, for we made it.

People expect that the law will be what the Supreme Court told them what the law was going to be.

The best [legal] codes extant, if malignantly criticized, will be found to furnish matter for censure in every page …

Bad facts make bad law.

Courts should interpret the law but leave elected lawmakers to create it.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

An act of Congress is binding upon all as much as if it were included … in the Constitution itself.

Political reasons have not the requisite certainty to afford rules of judicial interpretation.

Measured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs, too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable.

[In drafting legislation:] There is no magic bullet to prevent judicial mistakes.

Whatever may have been the intention of the framers of a constitution, or of a law, that intention is to be sought for in the instrument itself, according to the usual and established rules of construction.

Legislation and adjudication must follow, and conform to, the progress of society.

The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.

[…] over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by asserting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discretion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

Courts do not make the law.

In the legislative branch, you make the laws... and our role as judges is to interpret the law, not to inject our own policy preferences. So our task is to give an honest construction to what laws are passed by the Legislature.

Good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion.

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

Law is largely crystallized custom.