Richard A. Posner Quotes

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside. The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body…. Judges who will bring to the Courts a present-day sense of the Constitution - Judges who will retain in the Courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject the legislative powers which the courts have today assumed.

If the law were so simple we would not have so many 5-4 decisions of the Supreme Court

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws.

There are judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes.

As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.

I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed.

It is better that the law should be certain than that every judge should speculate upon improvements in it.

Courts do not make the law.

For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, 'Brown' must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.

Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.

If the country comes to believe that judges are politicians in robes no end of difficulty will come from that.

Remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law but to interpret and apply it

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules ; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a bail game to see the umpire.

The fact that the judiciary makes foolish rulings doesn’t mean the government should intervene.

We must keep in mind the vast power entrusted to Federal judges. They never stand for election. Once appointed, they serve for life. The havoc that a Federal District Court Judge can wreak is substantial.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

Measured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs, too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable.

It is very important to know the law, but it is more important to know the judge

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.