Fairness in Law Quotes

In the criminal justice community, as a judge, being tough is not enough. You have to be fair.

I believe in equal rights for all citizens. One law for all.

Some lawyers and judges may have forgotten it, but the purpose of the court system is to produce justice, not slavish obedience to the law.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

You say men ought to be hung for the way they are executing the law; I say the way it is being executed is quite as good as any of its antecedents. It is being executed in the precise way which was intended from the first, else why does no Nebraska man express astonishment or condemnation? Poor Reeder is the only public man who has been silly enough to believe that anything like fairness was ever intended, and he has been bravely undeceived.

It is as much the duty of government to render prompt justice against itself, in favor of citizens, as it is to administer the same between private individuals.

The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

We have long moved away from some of the principles of law as to what is fair and equitable in the United States. We all see every day that's debatable, 50-50 in almost all cases.

Judicial excellence requires an understanding that the law is more than an intellectual game and more than a mental exercise. He or she must recognize that real people with real problems are affected by the decisions rendered by the court. Justice, after all, may be blind, but it should not be deaf.

I do not think everyone is created equal. In fact, I know they're not. [The Constitution] means that everyone should have the same laws as everyone else. It doesn't mean that everyone's as smart or as cute or as lucky as everyone else.

It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.

In our hearts and in our laws, we must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. . . .

We have allowed the system to be so corrupted that many want justice to be "empathetic," not blind.

None shall take advantage of his own wrong.

Diversity on the bench is critical. As practitioners, you need judges who 'get it!' We need judges who understand what discrimination feels like. We need judges who understand what inequality feels like. We need judges who understand the subtleties of unfair treatment and who are willing to call it out when they see it!

Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.

We want laws to be applied predictably.

In civil jurisprudence it too often happens that there is so much law, that there is no room for justice, and that the claimant expires of wrong in the midst of right, as mariners die of thirst in the midst of water.

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe.

The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society.