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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Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
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The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.
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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
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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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Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.
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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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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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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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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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Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.
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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