Legal Reasoning Quotes

Reason is the Soul of the Law.

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.

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

What I learned from clerking for Judge Guido Calabresi and for Justice Steven Breyer was that there is no position, regardless of how wrong you think it is, that does not have some arguments in its favor, and you have to find them. And then, no matter how right your own position is, you must look for the weaknesses in that they are always there. You must be willing to find them and possibly change your approach or your mind on the subject.

Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.

In all actions at law it shall be the libertie of the plantife and defendant by mutual consent to choose whether they will be tryed by the Bensh or by a Jurie, unlesse it be where the law upon just reason hath otherwise determined. The like libertie shall be granted to all persons in Criminall cases.

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.

The criterion of constitutionality is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.

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

The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.

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.

We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

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.

Subdue By force, who reason for their law refuse, Right reason for their law.

We all come to the [Supreme] Court with our bags fully packed. What we take out of them may not have been used before, but they were there.

I entirely differ with the Government as to the value of precedents. In this case, as in others, precedents are not mere dusty phrases, which do not substantially affect the question before us. A precedent embalms a principle.

The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.

During my years as a practicing lawyer, it just was part of your study of what Congress was trying to say in their statutes. I never really considered judges or scholars as either those who used legislative history or those who were opposed to it until after I got on the court.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

The law has to be, in part, a teacher.

English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

Bad facts make bad law.