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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOIn 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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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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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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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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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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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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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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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 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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Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
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The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
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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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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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The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
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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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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