John Fleming Quotes

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.

A corollary is that, when laws are out of touch with the people, those laws can and should be changed - from the most simple local regulations to the highest law of the land, our federal Constitution.

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution

No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law.

Stare decisis is usually the wise policy, because in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right. ... But in cases involving the Federal Constitution, where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions. ... This is strikingly true of cases under the due process clause.

I'd like to work on having every fourth year become a year in which no laws are made, but the old laws are reviewed, updated, or deleted as needed. That way we won't get endless, obsolete laws piling up on the books.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.

In this constantly evolving world, Congress must be a good steward of policy to ensure our laws at least keep pace.

In a number of cases dissenting opinions have in time become the law.

It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.

Let's create a legal system that can work.

I've seen Congress do some remarkable things within a short period of time.

Any law can be changed, obviously, at any time.

By this act the president alone is empowered to make the law, to fix in his mind what acts, words, what thoughts or looks, shall constitute such a crime.

None of us takes amending the Constitution lightly. The plain fact is this amendment has been exhaustively studied and it really is time to act.

The end game is you change that law to making that law better, whichever law you're talking about.

If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.

Look, I think by the time my case was over and other ones, everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress said we can't run a government by this kind of process and they repealed the law and that's good.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

Rather than waiting for future trials to determine rules that will impact every citizen, Congress should step in and write a law that takes every American's rights into consideration.

An investigation in which the processes of law-making and law-evaluating are submerged entirely in exposure of individual behavior—in adjudication, of a sort, through the exposure process—is outside the constitutional pale of congressional inquiry.

The administration cannot very well let its social program down because of adverse Supreme Court decisions .

If the Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, prevents the proper solution of our social and economic problems, should we do something to the Constitution to meet the difficulty, or should we do something to the Supreme Court?