Law Quotes - Page 327

But listening to him [Barack Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state Senate.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.

On the law that requires women to wait twenty-four hours before they are permitted to have an abortion: I think it's a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty.

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.

Historically, it took a long time before the court took any women law clerks. Finally, it did, but the numbers have never matched very effectively the percentages of law graduates out of graduating classes. We have far more than we ever did before and it's continued to grow, but it isn't a nice match yet.

being a member of the court is a lot like walking through fresh concrete. Do you remember doing that as a child and leaving a footprint and it hardens after you? I'm afraid that's what we do and we look back and we see those opinions we've written and they've sort of hardened after us.

I tried to decide each case based on the law and the Constitution.

You have to answer the question, like it or not. And the questions deserve a valid legal response, even if the response isn't one that will be easily understood. You have an obligation as a member of the court to do what you are bound to do under federal law, even if it isn't an attractive resolution from a public standpoint.

I finally gave up my little law practice and stayed home for about three years. You have to do what you can to keep the family going. But I wanted to get back to work. So I got another babysitter and went to work as an Assistant Attorney General.

In my work a good library is essential. It enables me to learn the background and previous discussions of the various issues I am called upon to decide. It provides the stability and continuity for the rule of law.

[P]erfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he . . . introduces confusion and disorder into society . . . [thus] where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.

I am sure from my experience of juries that, in a criminal case especially, they will obey the law as declared by the Judge; they will take the law from the Judge, whether they like it or do not like it, and apply it honestly to the facts before them.

As long as we have to administer the law we must do so according to the law as it is. We are not here to make the law.

It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.

For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.

I must lay down the law as I understand it, and as I read it in books of authority.

We have to administer the law whether we like it or no.

A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship.

Law grows, and though the principles of law remain unchanged, yet (and it is one of the advantages of the common law) their application is to be changed with the changing circumstances of the times. Some persons may call this retrogression, I call it progression of human opinion.

We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

I’ve consequently played a lot of different cops from a lot of different kind of law enforcement agencies.

Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with.

All violation of established practice implies in its own nature a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgment: he, therefore, who differs form others without apparent advantage, ought not to be angry if his arrogance is punished with ridicule; if those whose example he superciliously overlooks, point him out to derision, and hoot him back again into the common road.