Legal Discretion Quotes

Are you willing to let any President choose what laws to enforce and what laws to change?

After all, clemency is by nature outside the rule of law. When conferred upon those already convicted of crimes, it unravels the decision of citizen-jurors who found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has.

I learned a couple things. The government can do to you whatever they want. They can break the laws, federal laws, as they see fit... You can't turn laws on and off as you deem fit.

He decided to plunge on with pardons over the department's objections, or where he knew that there would be objections if he had let career prosecutors know what he was doing.

For centuries, the courts took the view that preserving the discretion of the authorities trumped the rights of victims to hold them to account. It was because of the Human Rights Act that this began to change.

The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging.

Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.

The Constitution is very clear: Congress has sole discretion over defining who is and who isn't a citizen and how you become one. It's not the 14th Amendment.

Prosecutorial charging and plea bargaining discretion, jury discretion to convict of one or another amorphously distinguished capital or non-capital crime, and gubernatorial discretion to grant or withhold clemency are all equally uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

The uniqueness of executive clemency lies in the president's power to act without weighing guilt, innocence and legal principle.

I think that sometimes the most intelligent things that prosecutors do is when they exercise their discretion not to go forward with a case.

Well, I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And that's what I try to do, is sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.

If a president can enforce a part of a law and delay a part of a law, then does he have a power to not enforce any law he so chooses? If he can allow illegal aliens to freely run across our border, can he force legal citizens out of the country? Where would be the end of his power?

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

We're talking about the lawyers for the United States of America. And I think it's very, very important that the lawyers be comfortable being very candid and open about their views on very sensitive issues affecting the United States.

The law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it — very loose, the line of the law — so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always — short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder — safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

The Constitution sets out no standards for granting pardons. They require no consent from Congress, and courts can't second-guess them.

Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exericised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law.

If you can turn off certain categories of law, do you not also have the power to turn off all categories of law?