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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.

Benjamin Cardozo

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Done Revision Tasks
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Expression Form Freedom
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Decision Justice Taken
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
The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Eternity Eye Prophet
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.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Balance Fairness Justice
Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Helping May Statutes
Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Choices Inaction
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
The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Competition Finals Law
The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Equality Erosion Liberty
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 judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Judging Knights Roaming
Law never is, but is always about to be.
BENJAMIN CARDOZO

Always Law never
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

Gain Honesty Men

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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