Legal Tradition Quotes

Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.

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

When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.

No one familiar with the common law of England can read the Constitution of the United States without observing the great desire of the Convention which framed that instrument to make it conform as far as possible with that law.

The ancient mode of trial by jury ... ought to remain sacred and inviolable.

American political theory has traditionally had much to say about rights and little about obligation. This tendency is wholesome; emphasis on rights is the most progressive characteristic of American legal traditions, the aspect of American law and social practice that is most admired abroad and best understood at home. People unversed in legal complexity do understand that they are entitled to the right of free speech, to a right against self-incrimination, to the right of religious freedom, to the right to a jury trial, to the right to vote. The Tenth Amendment is crucial: rights not granted to the state are reserved to the people. It is not a bad thing to live in a system in which we have so many rights that we do not list them all.

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

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

The base that Marshall built in law, and in tradition, transcends his life and animates the rest of American history. Part of the genius of John Marshall, is that in a very real sense, he invented the Supreme Court.

The old laws of England — they Whose reverend heads with age are gray, Children of a wiser day; And whose solemn voice must be Thine own echo — Liberty!

I am a judge born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand.

What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape till custom make it Their perch, and not their terror.

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation's interests and enforcing its laws - all of them, not just selective ones - in a manner worthy of the department's name.

A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.

Common law is common right.

I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition.

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.

Englishmen are said to love their laws; - that is the reason, I suppose, they give us so many of them, and in different editions.

When primitive law has once been embodied in a Code, there is an end to what may be called its spontaneous development.

It is recorded how towards the end of the eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to England was taken to see the House of Commons at work. He later wrote of his astonishment at finding the that the British Parliament actually made laws and fixed punishments for their infraction - because unlike Muslims the English had not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven and therefore had to resort to such unsatisfactory expedients. Muslims still understand the expression 'the rule of law' very differently than do most Westerners.

I think the American justice system has a lot more issues than the European justice system, especially the Scottish justice system. We have a really nice mix of European codified law and the traditional English system of common law, which is what the American system is based on.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.