Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
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More truly characteristic of dissent is a dignity, an elevation, of mood and thought and phrase. Deep conviction and warm feeling are saying their last say with knowledge that the cause is lost. The voice of the majority may be that of force triumphant, content with the plaudits of the hour, and recking little of the morrow. The dissenter speaks to the future, and his voice is pitched to a key that will carry through the years.
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The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.
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As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.
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Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
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What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
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No judicial system could do society's work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
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It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.
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The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.