I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.
BENJAMIN CARDOZOThe constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
More Benjamin Cardozo Quotes
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Law never is, but is always about to be.
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The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
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History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
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The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed.
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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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The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
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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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Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
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The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.
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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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Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.
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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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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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The difference is no less real because it is of degree.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO