Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process.
Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.
I think it's important for the American people to know that the position of originalism isn't itself an originalist position.
I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.
There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.
Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.
It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.
In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is.
Most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. I can tell you about some I lose. A lawyer who wins all his cases does not have many.
[Oliver Wendell] Holmes never believed in the truth and morality of the laws he was upholding. He said, "I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people."
Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.
Law must be viewed as a formless mass of isolated decisions.
I am a firm believer in open justice, and an opponent of closed justice in any normal circumstances. But I am also an opponent of legal purism, and have no time for institutionalised mythmaking - whether from the authoritarian right or the liberal left.
Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies.
