Legal Consistency Quotes

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

A written constitution guides and directs the application of law in a way utterly unlike oral guidance. It reminds us that the certainty and consistency of legal application is essential.

There is an international law just as there has always been a law against theft, but because the thief gets away with his booty at times is no reason why we should say that the law against theft has been abrogated.

Promoting a religious agenda that is to apply to every citizen is inconsistent with our laws in the US. It seems to me that your community and mine can live and work together without conflict.

It's about the principles, it's about the rule of law. You don't have to stay silent when you see something that you don't like that is inconsistent of these timeless principles.

But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.

I've always thought if we don't want to enforce laws on the books, we should remove them from the books. But when you have laws, you breed contempt if you don't enforce them.

Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.

If the Constitution says that marriage is between a man and woman, then things that are inconsistent with that would be inconsistent with the Constitution.

If you love the rule of law, you must love it in all of its applications. You cannot only love it when it provides the verdict you seek; you must love it when the verdict goes against you as well.

We are a nation of laws, not department-wide memos.

A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, 'This is my theory... and this is what I'm going to be faithful to and consistent with,' and in twenty years will look back and say, 'I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area.'

Should the high court be able to roll back state health regulations whose efficacy was at least debatable? If your answer is yes, logical consistency should encourage you to apply this same logic to the court's consideration of state-level gun control.

The very idea of the law in a constitutional republic involves the requisite that it be a rule, a guide, uniform, fixed and equal, for all, till changed by the same high political power which made it. This is what entitles it to its sovereign weight.

We can't pick and choose when to adhere to the Constitution and when to cast it aside.

You cannot strengthen the law by violating the law.

Proponents of nationwide injunctions argue that they are necessary to ensure that the law is uniform throughout the country. But the federal judiciary wasn't made to produce instant legal uniformity.

“Hard cases make bad law” is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

The law is the law whether you're dealing with a multi-million-pound fraud or a car deal where someone feels diddled because their exhaust falls off on the way home.

Having a judicious temperament is far more important than having a consistent judicial methodology.

Sometimes, it might be called conservative; sometimes it might be called liberal. But the point is that the meaning of the Constitution and other laws should not change unless we the people change them.

It is better that the law should be certain than that every judge should speculate upon improvements in it.

We cannot uphold the rule of law only when it is consistent with our beliefs. We must uphold it even when it protects behavior that we don't like or is unattractive or is not admirable or that might even be hurtful.

The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.

No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.