20th-century Judge Quotes

The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations, is a measure of governmental interference. And when those forced revelations concern maters that are unorthodox, unpopular, or even hateful to the general public, the reactions in the life of the witness may be disastrous.

In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor... of the government's ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being.

William Rehnquist

I think it is important for judges not to have agendas or to have strong ideology or ideological views. That is baggage.

Clarence Thomas

This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, abortions, pornography, pollution, poisoning, and proliferation of crimes of all types.

Braswell Deen, Jr.

In ancient Israel and Rome the judge had appeared as a stand-in for the divine, and corruption was a blinding of the representative of the divine.

John T. Noonan, Jr.

Philosophy became a gloomy science, in the labyrinth of which people vainly tried to find the exit, called The Truth.

Edward Joseph Schwartz

The key is to find out whether being gay is an illness that requires medical treatment or whether it is a natural phenomenon which was unfortunately misunderstood over the years because gay people consisted of a relatively smaller proportion of the human population. If scientific evidence supports the former statement, I would defend the current law, which maintains that marriage is a commitment between a male and a female; but if science proves the latter to be correct, I would argue that current law violates gender equality and thus must be amended.

The burning of the house of the offender is not a permissible punishment for arson. The rape of the offender is not a permissible punishment of a rapist. Why should murder be a permissible punishment for murder?

You cannot pick out one bit—pick out the plums and leave the duff behind.

I think that the court has misapplied a great constitutional principle. I cannot see how 'official religion' is established by letting those who want to say a prayer say it. On the contrary, I think that to deny the wish of these school children to join in reciting this prayer is to deny them the opportunity of sharing in the spiritual heritage of the nation.

We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.

John Marshall Harlan II

What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough – as they might do, for example, another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown – some one person will come forward and say, "Give me total power, and I will solve this problem." That is how the Roman republic fell….That is how democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.

A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty enacted in by the Knesset in 1992, to anchor in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state two strands – the Jewish heritage and the democratic tradition... and it is the task of the courts to interweave them into the synthesis indicated by the Basic Law

I make it clear that it will be for me to decide as I think right within my terms of reference the matters which will be the subject of my investigation.

Brian Hutton, Baron Hutton

Prison is a most expensive way of making bad people worse.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

This is a case of a barmaid who was badly bitten by a big dog.

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

I strongly condemn this crime, and am of the opinion that those who are found guilty by a court of law should be given harsh punishment. At the same time, I would like to know whether the same hue and cry which has been raised about it in the media and in Parliament would have been raised had this incident happened in some other part of India, particularly in rural India. I am sure it would not. But surely Delhi is not the whole of India.

Markandey Katju

The hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar: the midnight knock on the door, the sudden disappearance, the show trial, the subjection of prisoners to genetic experiment, the confession extracted by torture, the gulag and the concentration camp, the gas chamber, the practice of genocide or ethnic clansing, the waging of aggressive war. The list is endless, Better to put up with some choleric judges and greedy lawyers.

Thomas Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill