Benjamin N. Cardozo quotes - page 2

I am ready to concede that the rule of adherence to precedent, though it ought not to be abandoned, ought to be in some degree relaxed. I think that when a rule, after it has been duly tested by experience, has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare, there should be less hesitation in frank avowal and full abandonment. ... That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be according to the established and settled judgment of society. (Benjamin N. Cardozo)
They do things better with logarithms. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
I was much troubled in spirit, in my first years upon the bench, to find how trackless was the ocean on which I had embarked. I sought for certainty. I was oppressed and disheartened when I found that the quest for it was futile. I was trying to reach land, the solid land of fixed and settled rules, the paradise of a justice that would declare itself by tokens plainer and more commanding than its pale and glimmering reflections in my own vacillating mind and conscience. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Bills of rights give assurance to the individual of the preservation of his liberty. They do not define the liberty they promise. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The judicial process, as was said at the outset of these lectures, is a process of search and comparison, and little else. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The defendant styles herself "a creator of fashions." Her favor helps a sale. Manufacturers of dresses, millinery and like articles are glad to pay for a certificate of her approval. The things which she designs, fabrics, parasols and what not, have a new value in the public mind when issued in her name. She employed the plaintiff to help her to turn this vogue into money. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
I sometimes think that we worry ourselves overmuch about the enduring consequences of our errors. They may work a little confusion for a time. In the end, they will be modified or corrected or their teachings ignored. The future takes care of such things. In the endless process of testing and retesting, there is a constant rejection of the dross, and a constant retention of whatever is pure and sound and fine. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
We like to picture to ourselves the field of law as accurately mapped and plotted. We draw our little lines, and they are hardly down before we blur them. As in time and space, so here. Divisions are working hypotheses, adopted for convenience. ... So also the duty of a judge becomes itself a question of degree, and he is a useful judge or a poor one as he estimates the measure accurately or loosely. He must balance all his ingredients, his philosophy, his logic, his analogies, his history, his customs, his sense of right, and all the rest, and adding a little here and taking out a little there, must determine, as wisely as he can, which weight shall tip the scales. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
It is the refutation alike of communism and socialism that they thwart the instinct of expansion; that they substitute for individual energy the energy of the government; that they substitute for human personality the blind, mechanical power of the State. The one system, as the other, marks the end of individualism. The one system, as the other, would make each man the image of his neighbor. The one system, as the other, would hold back the progressive, and, by uniformity of reward, gain uniformity of type. I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men that, under the dominion of the State, at the cost of all freedom of action, at the cost, indeed, of their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair abundance of the material blessings of life. ... Into that prison of socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under the mastery of the State, while human personality is preferred to unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is an illusion. (Benjamin N. Cardozo)
You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. ... Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Liberty in the most literal sense is the negation of law for law is restraint, and the absence of restraint is anarchy. On the other hand, anarchy by destroying restraint would leave liberty the exclusive possession of the strong or the unscrupulous. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Law never is, but is always about to be. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
It is well enough to say that we shall be consistent, but consistent with what? . . . The origins of the rule? The course and tendency of development? With logic or philosophy? With the fundamental conceptions of jurisprudence? All these loyalties are possible. All have sometimes prevailed. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
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 of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
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 the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics. (Benjamin N. Cardozo)
The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The reconciliation of the irreconcilable, the merger of antitheses, the synthesis of opposites, these are the great problems of the law... View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Deep below consciousness are other forces, the likes and the dislikes, the predilections and the prejudices, the complex of instincts and emotions and habits and convictions. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo
We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own. View quote
Benjamin N. Cardozo