Legal Doctrine Quotes

Tribal sovereign immunity is an anachronism in today’s world.

I had a very long discussion with Justice Gorsuch in my office, and he pointed out to me that he is a co-author of a whole book on precedent. So, someone who devotes that much time to writing a book on precedent, I think, understands how important a principle that is in our judicial system.

One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, today is doctrine.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

Stare decisis is usually the wise policy, because in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right. ... But in cases involving the Federal Constitution, where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions. ... This is strikingly true of cases under the due process clause.

Facts, even false ones, cannot be copyrighted.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day when a later decision may possibly correct the error …

They [Indians] have so long been recognized as slaves in our law, that it would be as great a violation of the rights of property to establish a contrary doctrine at the present day, as it would in the case of Africans, and as useless to investigate the manner in which they originally lost their freedom.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

The agreement of the parties cannot make that good which the law maketh void.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

Bad facts make bad law.

There's no certainty in the law.

Law is not a science, but is essentially empirical.

The first-sale doctrine reflects basic common sense - and follows from the logic of treating copyrights and other 'intellectual property' with no more protection than regular property.

Without any direction from Congress, our judicial branch has unilaterally created and defined qualified immunity.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

Like other high subjects, the Law gives no ground to common sense.

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

In the early centuries of Islam, the great schools of Islamic jurisprudence were built upon the above principles. Basic to all their legal systems they developed the doctrine that liberty is the fundamental basis of law.