The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOIt 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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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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We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
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Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
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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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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
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Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO