Learned Hand quotes - page 2

How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change. (Learned Hand)
It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.
Learned Hand
With the courage which only comes of justified self-confidence, he dared to rest his case upon its strongest point, and so avoided that appearance of weakness and uncertainty which comes of a clutter of arguments. Few lawyers are willing to do this it is the mark of the most distinguished talent.
Learned Hand
The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.
Learned Hand
For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.
Learned Hand
The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.
Learned Hand
If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.
Learned Hand
Justice, I think, is the tolerable accomodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accomodations concretely.
Learned Hand
Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.
Learned Hand
Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
Learned Hand
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. (Learned Hand)
Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.
Learned Hand
This is the most miserable of cases, but we must dispose of it as though it had been presented by actual lawyers.
Learned Hand
Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself.
Learned Hand
Most of my issues that mankind sets out to settle, it never does settle... The dispute fades into the past unsolved, though perhaps it may be renewed as history and fought over again. It disappears because it is replaced by some compromise that, although not wholly acceptable to either side, offers a tolerable substitute for victory...
Learned Hand
We like rather to dream of a body of young men as a live thing, as a tree where all the branches are nourished by a single sap, and where each part is meaningless and incomplete except in connection with its fellows. You may lop away the dead branches, you may bend the trunk, you may dig about it and water it; but leave it to assume its own form, do not constrain the peculiar roots, or you will have a crippled, gnarled monster, and no tree.
Learned Hand
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.
Learned Hand
We believe, and I think properly, that when the men who met in 1787 to make our Constitution they made the best political document ever made; but, remember, they did so very largely because they were great compromisers.
Learned Hand
It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.
Learned Hand
The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.
Learned Hand
You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt. (Learned Hand)
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
Learned Hand
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture.
Learned Hand
There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand
Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.
Learned Hand