Top 50 Quotes About Precedents
#1. Precedents once established are so much positive power.
James Madison
#2. But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent.
Richard A. Posner
#3. Occasionally we have to interpret an international treaty - one, perhaps, affecting airlines and liability for injury to passengers or damage to goods. Then, of course, we have to look to the precedents of other member nations in resolving issues.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#4. The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.
Bernard Bailyn
#5. The American Civil Liberties Union, has helped neutralize the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our legal system by seeking new legal precedents.
Bill Bright
#6. The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.
Stephen Wolfram
#7. Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence ... But a solitary precedent ... which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.
Henry Clay
#8. We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.
Douglas Coupland
#9. One of the worst consequences politically would be for the majority of Democrats to vote for someone who, in the near future, would overturn well-established precedents on clean air, clean water, privacy, equal opportunity and religious liberty.
Ralph Neas
#11. A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
David Del Tredici
#12. Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'
Susan Stewart
#13. To support its conclusion that 'this is a religious people ... this is a Christian nation,' the Court paraded a veritable litany of precedents from American history: taken from Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S.; 143 U.S. 457-458 (1892).
David Barton
#14. Nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#16. As to precedents, to be sure they will increase in course of time; but the more precedents there are, the less occasion is there for law; that is to say, the less occasion is there for investigating principles.
Samuel Johnson
#17. Defining marriage is a power that should be left to the states. Moreover, no state should be forced to recognize a marriage that is not within its own laws, Constitution, and legal precedents.
John Sununu
#18. [I]deas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences.
Sarah Vowell
#19. As the first of every thing, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.
George Washington
#20. To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.
Irving R. Kaufman
#21. When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#22. It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.
Irvine Welsh
#23. There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.
John Niven
#24. Precedents are treated by powerful minds as fetters with which to bind down the weak, as reasons with which to mistify the moderately informed, and as reeds which they themselves fearlessly break through whenever new combinations and difficult emergencies demand their highest efforts.
Charles Babbage
#25. It is found by experience that admirable laws and right precedents among the good have their origin in the misdeeds of others.
Tacitus
#27. It was a startling task to undertake, for the Book of Mormon had never been illustrated before, at least on any professional level. There were no precedents.
Arnold Friberg
#28. Fuck money, I don't rap for dead presidents, I'd rather see the president dead, it's never been said, but I said precedents.
Eminem
#29. What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.
Tacitus
#30. Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
Andre Malraux
#31. The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.
Belva Lockwood
#33. The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
Claude Debussy
#34. The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.
Mary McCarthy
#35. Most communities attempting to survive under irresistible pressure from a dominant culture develop a myth that allows them to believe they are somehow a special people. Chosen. Favored by the gods. Gypsies, Jews
plenty of historical precedents
Orson Scott Card
#36. To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think.
William Cowper
#37. I love Obama, and I love the fact that it's a black president of the United States of America, but he's not the first black president. Robert Mugabe is a black president, too, so let's not get to talking about precedents being set.
Lupe Fiasco
#38. Precedents are the disgrace of legislation. They are not wanted to justify right measures, are absolutely insufficient to excuse wrong ones. They can only be useful to heralds, dancing masters, and gentlemen ushers.
Laurence Sterne
#39. But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.
Henry David Thoreau
#40. Think about the precedents you are setting. It's the Left that runs the world on reckless emotionalism. Don't join.
Michelle Malkin
#41. History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.
C.V. Wedgwood
#42. 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
#43. As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
#44. Precedents are dangerous things; let the reins of government then be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended: If defective let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.
George Washington
#45. I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.
Bill Nighy
#46. The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.
Thomas Paine
#47. Historically courts in this country have been insulated. We do not look beyond our borders for precedents.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#48. Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around.
Jerome Frank
#49. Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.
James Madison
#50. We really didn't have any literature telling us it was a good thing to be a woman artist. When I was trained, there were no precedents, and that was something to get really angry about.
Miriam Schapiro
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