Legal Evolution Quotes

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

Public opinion is always in advance of the law.

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

The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. It takes a broader view to-day. A promise may be lacking, and yet the whole writing may be "instinct with an obligation," imperfectly expressed. If that is so, there is a contract.

There is not, in the whole compass of human affairs, so noble a spectacle as that which is displayed in the progress of jurisprudence; where we may contemplate the cautious and unwearied exertion of a succession of wise men, through a long course of ages, withdrawing every case, as it arises, from the dangerous power of discretion, and subjecting it to inflexible rules.

Law cannot stand apart from the social changes around it.

Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.

Law never is, but is always about to be.

Our lady the Common Law is a very wise old lady though she still has something to learn in telling what she knows.

It has been more than 60 years since the constitution was put in place. There are provisions in the constitution that no longer suit the times. Since the constitution was promulgated, we've seen the emergence of new values, such as privacy, the environment and so on, which need to be incorporated.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.

Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society.

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

I do not have, nor do I believe I have seen, a vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle for the next phase in the law of our Constitution.

After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

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

Readiness to change from old law to new law enfeebles the power of the law.

Good laws derive from evil habits.

I do accept that, with - with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn't exist at the time.

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

Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.