Judge Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Richard de Bury

Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated.

William J. Wilkins (Washington state judge)

The First Amendment, I think, is the jewel of our Constitution.

When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.

Andrew Coyle Bradley

A very ingenious attempt to drive a coach-and-four through this Act of Parliament.

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley

This contract is so one-sided that I am surprised to find it written on both sides of the paper.

Raymond Evershed, 1st Baron Evershed

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.

Science cannot determine origin, and so cannot determine destiny. As it presents only a sectional view of creation, it gives only a sectional view of everything in creation.

Thomas Charles Munger

Masterly inactivity may be prudence to one man, desperate rashness to another.

Arthur Kekewich

It is absolutely true that I have served in two Democratic administrations. You can tell something from me and my political views from that.

Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.

Robert H. Jackson

Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses.

Charles Evans Hughes

Hail, Columbia! happy land!
Hail, ye heroes! heaven-born band!
Who fought and bled in Freedom's cause,
Who fought and bled in Freedom's cause,
And when the storm of war was gone,
Enjoyed the peace your valor won.
Let independence be our boast,
Ever mindful what it cost;
Ever grateful for the prize,
Let its altar reach the skies!

Joseph Hopkinson

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

Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden

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.

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.

Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

Fill every beaker up, my men, pour forth the cheering wine:
There's life and strength in every drop,—thanksgiving to the vine!

Albert Gorton Greene

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

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

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.