Adversarial System Quotes

In representing criminal defendants—especially guilty ones—it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct.

I'm sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I've seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.

As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn't need his help.

The criminal defense attorney is misunderstood if not despised by most of society. It doesn't matter if we believe in our adversarial system and the ideal that everyone charged with a crime is entitled to a vigorous defense. Ideals give away to reality - defense lawyers working loopholes and angles to get their clients off.

Each lawyer makes somebody unhappy either by beating him, embarrassing him or tying him in knots.

Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.

Auditur et altera pars. (The other side shall be heard as well.)

If diversity is so important for freedom of thought and the robust exchange of ideas, why are students and administrators shutting down debates in the name of diversity? Why, indeed, are these attacks on the First Amendment led by deans of "diversity, equity, and inclusion?" Debate and conflict are essential to our adversarial system of justice—yet the protesters at Stanford want to hear only from those who agree with them. That is not what "diversity" was supposed to encourage.

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.

All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.

When I became a judge, I stopped being a practicing attorney. And that was a big change in role.The role of a practicing attorney is to achieve a desirable result for the client in the particular case at hand. But a judge can't think that way. A judge can't have any agenda, a judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case and a judge certainly doesn't have a client.

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

I don't believe man is a woman's natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.

Trials are no longer about freeing the innocent, punishing the guilty, and making restitution to the injured. They have devolved into a contest over who will win.

He, who decides a case without hearing the other side, though he decides justly, cannot be considered just.

You never know when you lose a case whether it was because the facts were against you, or because the judges had already made up their minds, or if you could have done something differently.

I know two types of law because I know two types of men, those who are with us and those who are against us.

If our courts lose their authority and their rulings are no longer respected, there will be no one left to resolve the divisive issues that can rip the social fabric apart ... The courts are a safety valve without which no democratic society can survive.

A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor.

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.

Trials by the adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood.

My lord, lawyers are a dangerous species of animals till ha'e any dependence upon--they are always starting punctilios and deeficulties among friends. Why, my dear lord, it is their interest that aw mankind should be at variance; for disagreement is the vary manure wi' which they enrich and fatten the land of leetigation; and as they find that constantly produces the best crop, depend upon it they will always be sure till lay it on ass thick ass they can.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.