Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

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.

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

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.

Though in many other countries everything is left in the breast of the Judge to determine, yet with us he is only to declare and pronounce, not to make or new-model the law.

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

Judges ought to remember that their office is Ius dicere and not Ius dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

The [Supreme] Court did not interpret the Constitution—the court amended it.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

The Supreme Court overrules, distinguishes, and upholds prior precedents. Sometimes it ignores them. But it does not - cannot - 'defy' them.

It is not the responsibility of the judiciary to amend poor legislative drafting, even if judges would personally prefer a different outcome than what is required by a statute's text.

As a general rule, I do not think judges should consider current societal preferences when ruling on constitutional challenges.

In my own opinions as a judge, I have never yet had occasion to find a statute ambiguous.

Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

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.

You’ve got to expect that there will be twists and turns [in court opinions], especially with major doctrine.

The real difficulty is not with the Constitution but with the judges who interpret it.

A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day when a later decision may possibly correct the error …

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

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.

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.

When Congress writes a good law, then there are fewer lawsuits trying to interpret it.

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.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

I don’t see why a Supreme Court justice has to have previous experience as a judge.

This Court always had disavowed the right to intrude its judgment upon questions of policy or morals