Charles Evans Hughes Quotes

There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence.

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.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

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.

Like other high subjects, the Law gives no ground to common sense.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,- that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances.

Little do you know what a gloriously uncertain thing law is.

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

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

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

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Bad facts make bad law.

I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

Law is the ultimate science.

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

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.

The law doesn't create a right.

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

It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

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