Law never is, but is always about to be.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe 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.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
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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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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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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 final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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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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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.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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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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We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
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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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Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
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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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO