Legal Discourse Quotes

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 want to commend the [Federalist] Society for bringing together the best minds from right, left, and center to debate the most pressing legal issues of the day.

A lot of people probably don't realize how difficult it is to stick to that lawyer speak when you're not a lawyer. I see everyone on 'The Good Wife' - everyone, people who have been there since day one - struggling with that language because it is just not how people talk.

The legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.

The majority opinions [of the Supreme Court] determined the cases but these dissenting opinions will determine the minds of the future.

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the Court. That will give you criticisms.

It always rankled me - in law school and the legal profession - when lawyers would speak to each other in their own exclusive language.

Norms appearing in the form of law entitle actors to exercise their rights or liberties. However, one cannot determine which of these laws are legitimate simply by looking at the form of individual rights. Only by bringing in the discourse principle can one show that each person is owed a right to the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible.

Reading a brief filled with ad hominem attacks is like listening to my kids fight, except that I have to wait until we're in the courtroom to tell the attacking lawyer what I think about it.

It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.

The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.