Legal Formalism Quotes

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.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.

Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

What can laws do without morals?

Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

The judge has no right to divinations of public opinion which run counter to its last formal expressions.

Law must be viewed as a formless mass of isolated decisions.