Benjamin N. Cardozo Quotes

15 quotes in 328 categories

• There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and…
• To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor…
• The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy…
• There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to…
• 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…
• The rules and principles of case law have never been treated as final truths but as working hypotheses, continually retested in those great laboratories of…
• I own that it is a good deal of a mystery to me how judges, of all persons in the world, should put their faith…
• In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and…
• There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
• The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.
• The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do…
• Lawsuits are rare and catastrophic experiences for the vast majority of men, and even when the catastrophe ensues, the controversy relates most often not to…
• 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…
• The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
• A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most…

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