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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Confidence Giving Judging Philosophy
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Judging Justice Law
Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Bars Membership Privilege
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Example Hands Humility
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Games Struggle Truth
Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Fraud Include Knowledge Pretense
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Art Dresses Fashion
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Illuminating Past
Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Danger May Rescue
Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Destructive Unchecked Unrelieved
We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Finding Illusion Mind Peace
The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Age Constitution Significance
No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Issue Judicial Raise Sysdtem
The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Duty Obeyed Perceived Risk
Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Choices Inaction
Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a legal right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Dark Mind Years

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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