Judge Quotes

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

Edward Joseph Schwartz

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

Richard de Bury

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

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

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

Definition is ordinarily supposed to produce clarity in thinking. It is not generally recognized that the more we define our terms the less descriptive they become and the more difficulty we have in using them.

The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.

Stephen Gardiner

The burden of Karma is heavy. All alike have heavy debts to pay. Yet none, so the Wisdom teaches, is ever faced with more than he can bear. Whether or not we can grin, we must bear it, and it is folly to attempt to run away.

Christmas Humphreys

No woman can become or remain degraded without all women suffering.

Never walk when you can ride, never sit when you can lie down.

Samuel Freeman Miller

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.

In some of our subcultures, paper bags are often used to carry intimate personal belongings. And the sight of some of our less fortunate citizens carrying their belongings in brown paper bags is too familiar to permit such crass biases to diminish protection of privacy.

David L. Bazelon

Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.

I could show how largely our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses and the teachings of Christ; how constantly the Bible is appealed to as the guide of life and the authority in questions of morals... Add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.

David Josiah Brewer

I have no hesitation in applying a law regardless of what I might think about it, I think any good judge recognizes his or her place in our constitutional government, and that place is not to upset the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. So, I do not have any compunction about following the law as written by Congress.

Thomas Hardiman

There is one kind of judge. There is an independent judge under our Constitution. And the fact that they may have been a Republican or Democrat or an independent in a past life is completely irrelevant to how they conduct themselves as judges. And I think two centuries of experience has shown us that that ideal which the Founders established can be realized and has been realized and will continue to be realized.

Brett Kavanaugh

It is easy to imagine how a young, protected child who sees portrayals of brutality is forever scarred and becomes determined to contribute in her own small way to social justice.

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.

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.

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.

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)

I sometimes feel as if I am watching justice die.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

I think that the best judges are the ones that seek to apply precedent in good faith. I think most judges do that. But that is something that has to be done in good faith without skewing the precedent one way or the other. At the same time, there has to be a respect for the work of the district courts and not take an ivory tower approach to the review of what happens there. Those judges are the ones that see the people before them. They see the witnesses.

Raymond Kethledge

When we are reduced to observation Science crawls.

John Fletcher Moulton, Baron Moulton

A student who can weave his technology into the fabric of society can claim to have a liberal education; a student who cannot weave his technology into the fabric of society cannot claim even to be a good technologist.

Charles Mengel Allen