Benjamin N. Cardozo - Social Quotes

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My analysis of the judicial process comes then to this, and little more: logic, and history, and custom, and utility, and the accepted standards of right conduct, are the forces which singly or in combination shape the progress of the law. Which of these forces dominate depends largely upon the comparative importance or value of the social interests that will be thereby promoted or impaired. … The most fundamental social interest is that law shall be uniform and impartial. … Uniformity ceases to be a good when it becomes uniformity of oppression.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. … Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
I am ready to concede that the rule of adherence to precedent, though it ought not to be abandoned, ought to be in some degree relaxed. I think that when a rule, after it has been duly tested by experience, has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare, there should be less hesitation in frank avowal and full abandonment. … That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be according to the established and settled judgment of society.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.

Benjamin N. Cardozo
Law, like other branches of social science, must be satisfied to test the validity of its conclusions by the logic of probabilities rather than the logic of certainty.

Benjamin N. Cardozo