Legal System Integrity Quotes

The law is a crude machine at best, and only spits out something approaching justice of its attendants are committed to justice. As lawyering has become less about doing right and more about doing what you can get away with, our standards of acceptable shenanigans-as-usual seem to be in a free fall.

I think it's pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system, without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country.

We don’t want to make any legal issue political. That has negative consequences.

The attorney general should be a watchdog for the rule of law, not a lapdog for the president - simple as that.

If people with the very best intentions carry on prosecutions that are oppressive, the end may not always perhaps sanctify the means.

Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means can justify ... a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence.

Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates.

“Hard cases make bad law” is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

There's a difference, though, between being a political appointee and putting a political operative in charge of a U.S. attorney's office.

We all hope that the police and prosecutors are objective. That's their job, but sometimes it's not true.

Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

New York [cannot] remain the center of commerce and capital for this continent, unless it has an independent bar and an honest judiciary.