Legislative Intent Quotes

A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize it or not; a bad law is one that cannot, however much you ordain it.

Judges should interpret the laws according to what they say, not according to what the judges wish they would say. Judges are supposed to interpret the laws; they are not supposed to make them.

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.

The nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.

All laws are promulgated for this end: that every man may know his duty; and therefore the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which must be put upon them.

When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.

Political reasons have not the requisite certainty to afford rules of judicial interpretation.

Surveillance legislation passed in good faith has been stretched well beyond its original purpose.

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.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.

Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act's limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.

Legislatures now pass statutes because of, not despite, their lack of clarity. By using vague language, legislators can avoid making the difficult political choices that they have to confront when drafting a statute precisely.

If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two [the Constitution and legislation], that which has superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.

The Courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgement; the consequences would be the substitution of their pleasure for that of the legislative body.

Most people who serve in Congress just want to do the right thing.

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

[…] over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by asserting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discretion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

During my years as a practicing lawyer, it just was part of your study of what Congress was trying to say in their statutes. I never really considered judges or scholars as either those who used legislative history or those who were opposed to it until after I got on the court.

Constitutions are interpreted differently from statutes.

The President cannot refuse to enforce a law simply because he does not like it.

Nothing happens in any legislative body that's not purposeful.

Whenever the words of a law will bear two meanings, one of which will give effect to the law, and the other will defeat it, the former must be supposed to have been intended by the Legislature, because they could not intend that meaning, which would defeat their intention, in passing that law; and in a statute, as in a will, the intention of the party is to be sought after

I don’t think we can pass a law that fixes stupid.