Quote

Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

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
Law
Successive
Common
Adaptation
Custom
Customs
Stock
Combination
Instance
Justice
Adaptations

More quotes by Learned Hand

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If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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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 understands the minds of other men and women.
Learned Hand
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As soon as we cease to pry about at random, we shall come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma and as soon as we come to rely upon accredited bodies of authoritative dogma, not only are the days of our liberty over, but we have lost the password that has hitherto opened to us the gates of success as well.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal
Learned Hand
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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
Learned Hand
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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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Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
Learned Hand
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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
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Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered but it has generally proved impossible to smother them and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
Learned Hand
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We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.
Learned Hand
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
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Seldom, if ever, does wisdom come, shall we punish it if it comes late?
Learned Hand
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Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
Learned Hand
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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.
Learned Hand
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Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.
Learned Hand
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For, when all is said, as my friend George Rublee likes to put it, the only success is to be a success as a person and it is still not too late for that.
Learned Hand