I've been indicted for rules that don't even exist.
Nothing could be more dangerous than following the popular maxim whereby it is the spirit of the law that must be consulted. This is an embankment that, once broken, gives way to a torrent of opinions.
No man has ever been hanged for breaking the spirit of the law.
There's no certainty in the law.
Nobody knows exactly what that means ... It has become a wish list for people who want things in the Constitution.
Referring to the Ninth Amendment:
That very document [Constitution] does little to serve people when Supreme Court decisions are written so that even high-priced lawyers can't figure them out.
Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.
Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.
When the laws lack clarity to the point where police officers who apply them have diverging opinions on their interpretation, can we reasonably expect that ordinary citizens can figure them out?
While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.
It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
The UN member states have not been able to agree upon a definition of terrorism. Terrorism is rather like pornography. You might not be able to define it but you know it when you see it.
The law rarely hesitates in declaring its own meaning; but the Judges are frequently puzzled to find out the meaning of others.
The law is above the law, you know.
Law in Ukraine is not black and white; it is shades of gray.
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.
Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.
Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
Commercial speech is like obscenity... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it.
I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.
The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
Theories of "natural law" and the "law of nations" are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [...] "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[....]
The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.
