Elizabeth Warren Quotes

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

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.

The rules of legal interpretation are rules of common sense, adopted by the courts in the construction of the laws.

The law has to be, in part, a teacher.

Spanish legislation is full of the sternest laws, enacted in utter disregard of their contingent and ulterior consequences provided the immediate object in view can be effected.

Good legislation should bring clarity and not confusion.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.

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.

When we visited with legislative counsel, they told us that the only way to effectively accomplish what we were trying to do was to put the words in the legislation.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

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

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

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

Whenever the words of a law will bear two meanings, one of which will give effect to the law, and the other will defeat it, the former must be supposed to have been intended by the Legislature, because they could not intend that meaning, which would defeat their intention, in passing that law; and in a statute, as in a will, the intention of the party is to be sought after

You cannot make a perfect law, but you can make a perfectible law.

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.

How a constitution is written can sometimes matter almost as much as what it contains.

Bad facts make bad law.

Unfortunately, some judges evidently do not regard a debate in Parliament on new immigration rules, followed by the unanimous adoption of those rules, as evidence that Parliament actually wants to see those new rules implemented.

Courts do not make the law.

It is not the responsibility of the judiciary to amend poor legislative drafting, even if judges would personally prefer a different outcome than what is required by a statute's text.

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.

How can you pass laws about things that nobody knows?" "They do it all the time," says Hayden. "That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.