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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

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Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Individual
Protection
Deemed
Given
English
Conducted
Littles
Indeed
Liberties
Little
Regard
Centuries
Much
Crime
Delusion
Century
Eras
Liberty
Vital
Law
Dawn
Prosecution

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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.
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
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The lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more important than a minor administrator, confined to a monotonous round of record and routine, without dignity, inspiration, or respect.
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The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.
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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
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Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.
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We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.
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The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics it grows less and less so.
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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
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No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
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Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.
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Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
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The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion.
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In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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