No judicial system could do society’s work if each issue had to be decided afresh in every case which raised it.
BENJAMIN CARDOZORest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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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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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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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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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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I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
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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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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
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The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
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There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
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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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Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO