Judge Quotes

I will drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement.

Mother brings a child late to contact by half-an-hour; father then requires an extra half-hour the next week. This is getting silly. If, in fact, the father does not see the child at all, of course he should see the child on another occasion, but there are fathers who actually add up the minutes and produce it and say "Now I should have so much more contact because I lost five minutes last week and ten minutes the week before".

Elizabeth Butler-Sloss

What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?

Andrew Napolitano

This overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary. In the legislative arena, especially when the country is closely divided, compromises tend to be the rule the day. But when judges rule this or that policy unconstitutional, there's little room for compromise: One side must win, the other must lose.

Governments always tend to want not really a free press but a managed or well-conducted one.

You came here loving Columbia Law School, I want you to leave here loving it a little bit more.

We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back into a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.

Henry L. Benning

It is the virtue of God, the Parmatma, the creator to do justice and we as judges merely act as his agents. I always seek guidance from the creator so that we do not make a wrong judgment. We act without favour or fear, ill will or affection. For me it makes no difference.

Rana Bhagwandas

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

When I hear of an 'equity' in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room—looking for a black hat—which isn't there.

Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen

Books delight us when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune frowns on us.

Richard de Bury

Convicted Criminal: As God is my judge—I am innocent.
Lord Birkett: He isn't; I am, and you're not!

Norman Birkett, 1st Baron Birkett

Everyone has, inside himself... what shall I call it? A piece of good news! Everyone is... a very great, very important character.

I am often asked what it was like to be a woman clerking for Justice Scalia. Much like being a man clerking for him is my easy answer. Justice Scalia believed in one simple principle: That law came to the court as an is not an ought. Statutes, cases and the Constitution were to be read for what they said, not for what the judges wished they would say. Each of his opinions needed to conform to that principle and to be written clearly, forcefully and accurately. If you could help him with that, you were useful to him. If not, then not. When we were working, we sometimes joked that he could not even remember our names.

We cannot suffer a person by his affidavit to arraign the whole justice of the country and its administration.

Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

In a criminal proceeding the question is not alone whether substantial justice has been done, but whether justice has been done according to law. All proceedings in poenam are, it need scarcely be observed, strictissimi juris; nor should it be forgotten that the formalities of law, though here and there they may lead to the escape of an offender, are intended on the whole to insure the safe administration of justice and the protection of innocence, and must be observed. A party accused has the right to insist on them as matter of right, of which he cannot be deprived against his will; and the Judge must see that they are followed.

Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet

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

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

A learned County Court judge in a book of memoirs recently said that the overwhelming amount of his time on the bench was taken up with people who are persuaded by persons whom they do not know to enter into contracts that they do not understand to purchase goods that they do not want with money that they have not got.

Wilfred Greene, 1st Baron Greene

On hearing that his butler was leaving because he could not take Lady Braxfield's scolding anymore:

Lord! ye've little to complain o': ye may be thankfu' ye're no married to her.

Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield

The proponents of a mandatory retirement age and term limits have underestimated the degree to which the rational actor model applies to Justices. In making many decisions, as the empirical evidence demonstrates, Justices attempt to maximize their own preferences, whether based on policy considerations or other factors. The retirement decision is no exception. Scholars who dispute the applicability of the rational actor model to Justices have either not focused on the persuasive empirical evidence advanced by political scientists or have failed to consider all of the variables that touch upon judicial utility.

We cannot explore any mode of sentencing a man to imprisonment, who is imprisoned already, but by tacking one imprisonment to the other.

John Eardley Wilmot

One would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally.

Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.

Felix Frankfurter

This is not the first time I've charged a person before I've made the case.