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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
Instance
Justice
Adaptations
Law
Successive
Common
Adaptation
Custom
Customs
Stock
Combination

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A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
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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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In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
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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 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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Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.
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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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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.
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A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.
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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.
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The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.
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Reputation, like a face, is the symbol of its possessor and creator, and another can use it only as a mask.
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Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
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The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.
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Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
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Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.
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Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
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