Judge Quotes

I sometimes feel as if I am watching justice die.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

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

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

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

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

The old idea of a good bargain was a transaction in which one man got the better of another. The new idea of a good contract is a transaction which is good for both parties to it.

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

Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud. It's open to fraud on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability.

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)

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

Deep down I've always known fly-fishing is to the rest of fishing what high seduction is to rape.

John D. Voelker

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

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

If you have never experienced life under a microscope, you need to understand that those who live a public life no longer are seen as 'real persons' — human beings. Rather they are objects to be examined, manipulated, ridiculed.

I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes [James Joyce's] Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.

John M. Woolsey

On slaves and their descendants:

They are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

Judges should always behave judicially by adjudicating, never politically by legislating. I leave policy to policymakers. They're preeminent, but they're not omnipotent. In other words, lawmakers decide if laws pass, but judges decide if laws pass muster. There's a fateful difference between activist judges who concoct rights and active judges who dutifully protect the rights our Framers actually enshrined.

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

Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband – it creeps up insidiously... step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone.

Geoffrey Lane, Baron Lane

A judge is not supposed to know anything about the facts of life until they have been presented in evidence and explained to him at least three times.

Hubert Parker, Baron Parker of Waddington

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.

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.

Whatever may be the case in a Court of morals, there is no legal obligation on the vendor to inform the purchaser that he is under a mistake, not induced by the act of the vendor.

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn

The kind of corruption the media talk about, the kind the Supreme Court was concerned about, involves the putative sale of votes in exchange for campaign contributions.

James L. Buckley

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.