George Herbert Quotes

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

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principles afterward.

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

They had to make their own laws in accordance with the necessities of time, and circumstances, the state of affairs, and the experience of judges.

We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice”.

The law is like rope...useful, necessary, strong, but it can be bent and twisted into all kinds of shapes depending on the occasion.

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

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

Justice is determined by the personality of the judges.

Original intent is a necessary fiction that jurists have invented to get a handle on the Constitution.

The law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it — very loose, the line of the law — so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always — short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder — safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

The government will certainly decide for itself on whose counsel they will settle the construction of the laws they are to execute. We are to look at the intention of the Legislature, and to carry it into execution while the lawyers are nibbling at the words of the law.

There is not, in the whole compass of human affairs, so noble a spectacle as that which is displayed in the progress of jurisprudence; where we may contemplate the cautious and unwearied exertion of a succession of wise men, through a long course of ages, withdrawing every case, as it arises, from the dangerous power of discretion, and subjecting it to inflexible rules.

We don't pay judges to think; we pay judges to rule on the law.

It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version.

Bad facts make bad law.

Too many of us had to suffer at the hands of a judiciary so independent that it often acted independently of both the basic principles of jurisprudence and the very constitution it swore to uphold and protect.

Judges should be in the business of declaring what the law is using the traditional tools of interpretation, rather than pronouncing the law as they might wish it to be in light of their own political views.

Law is made for man and not man for the law. Wherever we can be sure that the most valuable interests of a nation require that we should decide one way, that way we ought to decide.

In the legislative branch, you make the laws... and our role as judges is to interpret the law, not to inject our own policy preferences. So our task is to give an honest construction to what laws are passed by the Legislature.

Our role as judges is to interpret the law.

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.'

I do not believe there are any circumstances in which a judge should consider his or her own values or policy preferences in determining what the law means.