Top 100 Law Judge Quotes
#1. The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
Alan Paton
#2. 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.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#3. 'Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.
Gary Bauer
#5. A good judge should never boast of his power, because he can do nothing but what he can do justly: he is not the master, but the minister of the law. Authority without virtue is a very dangerous state.
Thomas F. Wilson
#6. A reasonable fine is such as the law will judge to be so ... but what a reasonable fine is, and who shall be the judge of it, the law has established no rule.
Philip Yorke, 1st Earl Of Hardwicke
#7. That's not the federal law. What you're confusing is law with the opinion of a justice, what one lone federal judge says is not law.
Roy Moore
#8. My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
Albert Camus
#9. I did a lot of theater in school. I thought maybe I wanted to go to law school or be a judge or a politician. And then I just kind of got smitten by the process of rehearsal and working with other actors and those kinds of challenges. And then comedy.
Rashida Jones
#10. If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.
Lysander Spooner
#11. Judge [Samuel] Alito has a reputation for being an exceptional and honest judge devoted to the rule of law, as well as being a man of integrity.
Chuck Grassley
#12. Being a judge is sometimes like raising children: litigants get the time they need, not necessarily the time they want, and you have to earn people's respect by communicating to them that you're going to listen, follow the law and make a fair decision.
Steven Pacey
#13. We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong ... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.
Alexander Bickel
#14. Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: "For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone." A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.
Frankie Boyle
#15. It is better that the law should be certain than that every judge should speculate upon improvements in it.
Robert Falcon Scott
#16. A judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail.
Mario Cuomo
#17. I had the good fortune to begin my legal career as a law clerk for a judge who really epitomized open-mindedness and fairness. He read the record in detail in every single case that came before me; he insisted on scrupulously following precedents.
Samuel Alito
#18. As a practising lawyer, I was mediocre, but I worked hard as a law officer of the state government and on the private side. After becoming a judge, I maintained a low profile in other activities and concentrated only on judicial work.
P. Sathasivam
#20. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,
why the judge does not dismiss his case,
why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.
Henry David Thoreau
#21. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#22. Even after going to law school, following the footsteps of my father (an accomplished lawyer and judge at the time); I realized that the suit would never replace the kimono!
Carlos Machado
#23. Here I am a woman attorney being told I can't practice law in slacks by a judge dressed in drag.
Florynce Kennedy
#24. A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
Mark Twain
#25. James 4:11 Detract not one another, my brethren. He that detracteth his brother, or he that judgeth his brother, detracteth the law and judgeth the law. But if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge.
Various
#26. Was anybody shooting at you?"
-George "Judge" Knott (responding to his son-in-law after hearing complaints about the army in 1963.)
"No."
-Son-in-law
"Well then, sounds like you had a pretty good day."
-George "Judge" Knott
Jennifer Rude Klett
#27. Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge ... There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.
Timothy Keller
#28. Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.
Wendy E. Long
#29. Such a prostitution of judicial power can never occur again under the shadow of the British law, for no jury within the wide circle of the empire would submit to such an infraction of their privilege, even if a judge could be found daring enough to attempt it.
Joseph Howe
#30. For every criminal case, the judge must construct a perfect syllogism: the major premise must be the general law; the minor premise, whether or not the action in question is in compliance with the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment.
Cesare Beccaria
#31. There's an assault on human sexuality, as Judge Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture war and on top of that if we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law.
Pat Robertson
#32. After law school, I had the opportunity to clerk for a tremendous judge, Leonard I. Garth, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, the court to which I was appointed in 1990.
Samuel Alito
#33. We are wide open and vulnerable and in all likelihood an activist judge will strike down our Defense of Marriage Act, our state law against gay marriage, this year. And in all likelihood, we will have gay marriage in 2004 in Minnesota , if we don't get this amendment on the ballot for November.
Michele Bachmann
#34. As a citizen and someone who was a judge on the constitutional law court for 18 years, I feel whenever I can raise my voice with the hope of being heard I need to do it, but I wouldn't assign a special wisdom and responsibility to writers.
Bernhard Schlink
#35. One understands why law clerks follow the Bluebook. But why a judge would direct his law clerks to do so, or even tolerate their doing so, is a mystery to me. Are judges sheep? Why should they care what kids at the Harvard Law Review consider proper abbreviation?
Richard A. Posner
#36. You want a judge who makes objective decisions, and that's why temperament is such an important component of being a judge. You have to earn people's respect, because they know that you are deciding the case based on the facts and the law, not because they're trying to be your friend.
Steven Pacey
#37. When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.
Cesare Beccaria
#38. A judge can't have any preferred outcome in any particular case. The judge's only obligation - and it's a solemn obligation - is to the rule of law.
Samuel Alito
#39. For me, taking the sort of dry principles of the law and bringing them into contact with human beings ... it's like you jump into hyperspace. And everything that's dull about the books and the theory becomes provocative.
Michael Ponsor
#41. If mob law is going to rule, better dismiss, judge, sheriff, etc., and let's all take chances alike. I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln [New Mexico.] Advise persons never to engage in killing.
Billy The Kid
#42. A hermit said, "Do not judge an adulterer if you are chaste or you will break the law of God just as much as he does. For he who said 'Do not commit adultery' also said 'Do not judge.
Rowan Williams
#43. It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves.
Samuel Adams
#44. True inner righteousness does not judge according to custom but by the measure of the most perfect law of God Almighty by which the mores of various places and times were adapted to those places and times.
Augustine Of Hippo
#45. I am sure from my experience of juries that, in a criminal case especially, they will obey the law as declared by the Judge; they will take the law from the Judge, whether they like it or do not like it, and apply it honestly to the facts before them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#46. The judge does not make the law. It is the people that make the law. It is the duty of a judge to do justice, but it is only the people that can be just
Alan Paton
#47. Oh judge! Your damn laws! The good people don't need them, and the bad people don't obey them.
Ammon Hennacy
#48. In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Robert Bork
#49. If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly.
Mario Cuomo
#50. I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed. I do well understand the difference between legislating and judging. As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#51. I'm glad I made the decision, although the practice of law - and particularly serving as a federal judge - was a part of my life that I really enjoyed and treasured and look back on it with fondness.
George J. Mitchell
#52. A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
#53. good lawyers know the law and that great lawyers know the judge?
Ashwin Sanghi
#54. Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.
Sonia Sotomayor
#55. I had the privilege of chairing Judge Samuel Alito confirmation hearing in 1990. And at that time, he had practiced law for 14 years, but only represented one client, the United States government.
Edward Kennedy
#56. Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
Learned Hand
#57. But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence.
Lysander Spooner
#58. The rules of war for federal court were contained in the 86 rules of federal civil procedure, the rules of the local federal court, and the courtroom rules of the particular federal judge.
Kenneth Eade
#59. I don't want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is.
Roy Cohn
#60. Man's first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#61. Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.
Henry Ward Beecher
#62. A wise judge, by the craft of the law, was never seduced from its purpose.
Robert Southey
#63. No government is lawful or innocent that does not recognize the moral law as the only universal law, and God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge, to whom nations in their national capacity, as well as individuals, are amenable.
Charles Grandison Finney
#64. Frank Johnson was recognized as one of the great federal judges of American history, I suppose. He was a law-and-order judge. He was a classical, I think, conservative. But he believed that civil rights provided in the Constitution applied to everybody.
Jeff Sessions
#65. A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.
Magdalen Braden
#66. The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#67. We cannot judge of the fact, but the law upon the fact.
Chris Pratt
#68. It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#69. It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins
Benjamin Cardozo
#70. I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ... " & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.
David Mitchell
#71. A revelation is to be received as coming from God, not because of its internal excellence, or because we judge it to be worthy of God; but because God has declared it to be His in as plain and undeniable a manner as He has declared creation and providence to be His.
William Law
#72. If I had forty wives in the United States, they did not know it, and could not substantiate it, neither did I ask any lawyer, judge, or magistrate for them. I live above the law, and so do this people.
Brigham Young
#73. Laws ... proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine.
Thomas Jefferson
#74. Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.
Jonathan Swift
#75. It's not right because it just isn't. You can't go round making up evidence just because you're convinced someone is guilty. You can't be judge and jury; that's not your job. (Liz)
Stella Rimington
#76. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.
John Paul Stevens
#77. O God and Lord, now the council condemns even Your own act and Your own law as heresy, since You Yourself did lay Your cause before Your Father as the just judge, as an example for us, whenever we are sorely oppressed.
Jan Hus
#78. It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
Edmund Burke
#79. I wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the president does. Judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the law. The job of a judge is to apply the law.
Sonia Sotomayor
#80. A good judge is not one who is impartial, but one who has prejudice for good.
Raheel Farooq
#81. Conscience has nothing to do as lawgiver or judge; but is a witness against me if I do wrong, and which approves if I do right. To act against conscience is to act against reason and God's Law.
Artur Phleps
#82. As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can't be just, be arbitrary
William S. Burroughs
#83. The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.
Byron White
#84. The law of England has established trial by judge and jury in the conviction that it is the mode best calculated to ascertain the truth.
Jeremy Bentham
#85. Drone attacks subvert the rule of law - we become judge, jury, and executioner - at the push of a button.
Mark McKinnon
#86. The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#87. A decision by the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or a decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decision of the Fuhrer.
Adolf Hitler
#88. It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#89. It is not the purpose of a juryman's office to give justice as a favor to whoever seems good to him, but to judge according to law, and this he has sworn to do.
Socrates
#91. Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#93. It would then be most admirably adapted to the purposes of justice, if laws properly enacted were, as far as circumstances admitted, of themselves to mark out all cases, and to abandon as few as possible to the discretion of the judge.
Aristotle.
#94. The universe does not judge us; it only provides consequences and lessons and opportunities to balance and learn through the law of cause and effect. Compassion is the recognition that we are each doing the best we can within the limits of our current beliefs and capacities.
Dan Millman
#95. I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law professor.
John Roberts
#96. It is a sad day for our country when the moral foundation of our law and the acknowledgment of God has to be hidden from public view to appease a federal judge.
Soledad O'Brien
#97. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Mary McCarthy
#98. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius.
Edgar Allan Poe
#99. It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.
John Adams
#100. At the heart of the American paradigm is the perception that law and its agents . . . police officers, correctional officers, attorneys and judges . . . are color-blind and thus justice is impartial, objective and seeks la verdad (the truth). But, la realidad (reality) differs.
Martin Guevara Urbina
