Quote

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

Learned Hand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Learned Hand
Age: 89 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 27
Died: 1961
Died: August 18
Judge
Lawyer
Philosopher
Albany
New York
Billings Learned Hand
Stock
Combination
Instance
Justice
Adaptations
Law
Successive
Common
Adaptation
Custom
Customs

More quotes by Learned Hand

Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.
Learned Hand
Image
It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.
Learned Hand
Image
There is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.
Learned Hand
Image
Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.
Learned Hand
Image
No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.
Learned Hand
Image
There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Learned Hand
Image
The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.
Learned Hand
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.
Learned Hand
Image
Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.
Learned Hand
Image
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
Image
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.
Learned Hand
Image
Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
Learned Hand