Legal Innovation Quotes

I will look, your Honor, and endeavor to find a precedent, if you require it; though it would seem to be a pity that the Court should lose the honor of being the first to establish so just a rule.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

I've never been impressed with bureaucratic tradition. I don't like it when the parties come to me and say, 'This is the way that it's always done, judge.' I never found anything in the oath I took or the statutes I was asked to look at that said, 'Judge, stop thinking, because this is the way it was done before.'

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.

Legislative novelty is not necessarily fatal; there is a first time for everything.

Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life.

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

Never underestimate the creativity of the American legal profession.

There was an ancient Roman lawyer, of great fame in the history of Roman jurisprudence, whom they called Cui Bono, from his having first introduced into judicial proceedings the argument, "What end or object could the party have had in the act with which he is accused."

The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome."