Judicial Magistrate Quotes

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

Though we have clear and full scriptures in the New Testament for abolishing the Ceremonial law, yet we nowhere read in all the new Testament of the abolishing of the Judicial law, so far as it did concern the punishing of sins against the Moral law, of which Heresy and seducing of souls is one, and a great one. Once God did reveal his will for punishing those sins by such and such punishments. He who will hold that the Christian Magistrate is not bound to inflict such punishments for such sins, is bound to prove that those former laws of God are abolished, and to shew some scripture for it.

We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant.

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?—Rousseau

Article IV The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them. If any person guilty of, or charged with, treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall, upon demand of the Governor or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offense. Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other State.

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied. With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws--for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience--cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . . We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race. Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our opposition to such offenses is rooted in religion, then are restraints upon murder and rape unconstitutional? We arrive at such absurdities if we attempt to erect a wall of separation between the operation of the laws and those Christian moral convictions that move most Americans. If we are to try to sustain some connection between Christian teaching and the laws of this land of ours, we must understand the character of that link. We must claim neither too much nor too little for the influence of Christian belief upon our structure of law. . . . I am suggesting that Christian faith and reason have been underestimated in an age bestridden, successively, by the vulgarized notions of the rationalists, the Darwinians, and the Freudians. Yet I am not contending that the laws ever have been the Christian word made flesh nor that they can ever be. . . . What Christianity (or any other religion) confers is not a code of positive laws, but instead some general understanding of justice, the human condition being what it is. . . . In short, judges cannot well be metaphysicians--not in the execution of their duties upon the bench, at any rate, even though the majority upon the Supreme Court of this land, and judges in inferior courts, seem often to have mistaken themselves for original moral philosophers during the past quarter century. The law that judges mete out is the product of statute, convention, and precedent. Yet behind statute, convention, and precedent may be discerned, if mistily, the forms of Christian doctrines, by which statute and convention and precedent are much influenced--or once were so influenced. And the more judges ignore Christian assumptions about human nature and justice, the more they are thrown back upon their private resources as abstract metaphysicians--and the more the laws of the land fall into confusion and inconsistency. Prophets and theologians and ministers and priests are not legislators, ordinarily; yet their pronouncements may be incorporated, if sometimes almost unrecognizably, in statute and convention and precedent. The Christian doctrine of natural law cannot be made to do duty for "the law of the land"; were this tried, positive justice would be delayed to the end of time. Nevertheless, if the Christian doctrine of natural law is cast aside utterly by magistrates, flouted and mocked, then positive law becomes patternless and arbitrary.

allowed. Those books belong to the examining magistrate.” “Oh, I see,” said K. and nodded, “they’re probably law books, and it’s in the nature of this judicial system that one is condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives, may still technically be law but they have been judicially abolished. The Fourth Amendment was written in 1789 in direct response to the arbitrary and unchecked search powers that the British had exercised through general warrants called “writs of assistance”, which played a significant part in fomenting the American Revolution. The amendment limits the sate’s ability to search and seize to a specific place, time, and event approved by a magistrate. It is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications.

there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?—Rousseau

Skipper Beverages Pvt. Ltd. v. State,[46]— “7. It is true that S. 156(3) of the Code empowers a Magistrate to direct the police to register a case and initiate investigations but this power has to be exercised judiciously on proper grounds and not in a mechanical manner. In those cases where the allegations are not very serious and the complainant himself is in possession of evidence to prove his allegations there should be no need to pass orders under S. 156(3) of the Code. The discretion ought to be exercised after proper application of mind and only in those cases where the Magistrate is of the view that the nature of the allegations is such that the complainant himself may not be in a position to collect and produce evidence before the Court and interests of justice demand that the police should

Critically, the French investigative team would also be given whatever support they required in Ireland, including full access to the original garda murder file. This ensured that the French investigators would have access to all witness statements, forensic reports, the crime scene photographs and the post-mortem examination file of State Pathologist Professor John Harbison. If the French police team had not had access to the Irish files, an investigation would be fatally compromised from the outset. This granting of access was unprecedented. It also confirmed, beyond any doubt, that no action would ever be taken by the DPP over the garda case file in Ireland. Any such action would be critically undermined from the very start by the fact that access to the file had been given to someone outside the Irish judicial process–and would open any future prosecution, even one taken on the basis of new evidence, to an immediate legal challenge based on a breach of process. While it was never confirmed, the astonishing level of access granted to Magistrate Gachon and his police team was clearly the result of consultations between Paris and Dublin at the very highest levels. Even allowing for existing European judicial and police cooperation protocols, journalists covering the case–including myself–felt the level of access given to the French was astonishing.

Actually," he said, "it's not my job to improve things here, as you put it, and if you said that to someone like the examining magistrate you'd be laughed at or punished. I certainly wouldn't have become involved in these matters of my own free will, and I would never have lost any sleep over the shortcomings of this judicial system. But because I was supposedly placed under arrest - I've been arrested, you see - I've been forced to take action in my own behalf.

As for magistrates,’ said Monsieur Grosjean, ‘what has happened to our judicial authorities? The police–yes, they are loyal still, but the judiciary, they will not impose sentences, not on young men who are brought before them, young men who have destroyed property, government property, private property–every kind of property. And why not, one would like to know? I have been making inquiries lately. The Préfecture have suggested certain things to me. An increase is needed, they say, in the standard of living among judiciary authorities, especially in the provincial areas.

To see so many lawyers, advocates, so many tribunals, so little justice; so many magistrates, so little care of common good; so many laws, yet never more disorders; tribunal litium segetem [the court a crop of lawsuits], the tribunal a labyrinth, so many thousand suits in one court sometimes, so violently followed! To see injustissimum saepe juri praesidentem, impium religioni, imperitissimum eruditioni, otiosissimum labori, monstrosum humanitati [the greatest wrongdoer often administering justice, the most impious in charge of religion, the most ignorant presiding over learning, the most idle over employment, and the most heartless over the distribution of charity]! To see a lamb executed, a wolf pronounce sentence, latro [a robber] arraigned, and fur [a thief] sit on the bench, the judge severely punish others, and do worse himself, eundem furtum facere et punire, rapinam plectere, quum sit ipse raptor [the same man commit the theft and punish it, punish robbery and be himself a robber]! Laws altered, misconstrued, interpreted pro and con, as the judge is made by friends, bribed, or otherwise affected as a nose of wax, good to-today, none to-morrow' or firm in his opinion, cast in his! Sentence prolonged, changed, ad arbitrium judicis [at the pleasure of the judge], still the same case, "one thrust out of his inheritance, another falsely put in by favour, false deeds or wills." Incisae leges negliguntur, laws are made and not kept; or if put in execution, they be some silly ones that are punished.