Legal Principles Quotes

Reason is the Soul of the Law.

Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.

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

We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution - not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.

The right of the inventor to his discovery, the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those principles of eternal justice, which God has implanted in the heart of man.

The principle of responsibility and collective sanctions is incompatible with the Western concept of justice.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics.

In reality there are two, and only two, foundations of law; and they are both of them conditions without which nothing can give it any force: I mean equity and utility.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason....

The Law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code.

The law of England is a law of liberty .

Right... is the child of law.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

Believing in and practising the principles of the rule of law is, with our liberty and democracy, among the most powerful weapons we have. It is less effective if we blur its clarity and we should do this as sparingly as possible.

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.

If confirmed by the Senate to serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep an open mind in every case and always strive to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the American rule of law.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

I'm trying to demystify the whole process. Make it simple, make it palatable. I want people to have respect for the law, and I want to educate people on the basics of the law.

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.

That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.

There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.