Judicial Precedent Quotes

Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

The Conservative may ask the following questions: If words and their meaning can be manipulated or ignored to advance the Statist’s political and policy preferences, what then binds allegiance to the Statist’s words? Why should today’s law bind future generations if yesterday’s law does not bind this generation? Why should judicial precedent bind the nation if the Constitution itself does not? Why should any judicial determination based on a judge’s notion of what is “right” or “just” bind the individual if the individual believes the notion is wrong and unjust? Does not lawlessness beget lawlessness? Or is not the Statist really saying that the law is what he says it is, and that is the beginning and end of it? And if judges determine for society what is right and just, and if their purpose is to spread democracy or liberty, how can it be said that the judiciary is coequal with the executive or legislative branch?

What’s the use of an admirable form of government if political parties and moneyed interests control it? What’s the use of our judicial system, if judges only quote precedents and ignore first principles? What’s the use of a Supreme Court if it’s swayed by the political winds of the hour?

Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.

unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.

The norm which the society at large has set today categorically is in the form of preventive measures to be clasped within the purview of its social fabric. The legislators of great economies on the other hand have retrospectively identified the offense, researched, debated and have successfully handed down several yards of legislation with ingrained penalties and punishment for the trespassers of what they think as appropriate, bearing in mind basic human rights of the offenders. And the sword of Damocles continues to haunt tiny sprouts of the society, ripping their souls and plunging them to misery, despair or death, to which several national and international judicial precedents bear witness.

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.

Charismatic authority is best described by a series of negatives—by what it is not.161 The staff of a charismatic leader is not made up of technically-trained officials. Appointment and dismissal, career and promotion have no place here, only the call of the leader himself. There is no hierarchical organization, no defined sphere of competence, and no salary scale. There is “no system of formal rules, of abstract legal principles,” no systematic judicial process, and no recognition of the normative status of precedent. Each judicial decision is arrived at de novo, as if by a fresh oracle of the divine. Charismatic authority repudiates the past and allows no place for tradition. Ordinary economic considerations have no place either, while “‘booty’ and extortion” are “the typical form of charismatic provision for needs.

Interpretation of laws and it's right application in its true spirit is the bedrock of any judicial mechanism and a legal system..There is a need to check the crevices of its precedents in the light of the laws at hand and the facts that have been dealt with. Though primafacie this may seem as a miniscule idea, it is wisdom to bear in mind that the purpose of the law is executing proper justice and executing order, and if this is ignored then, the purpose of the existence of such a mechanism of justice is itself thwarted. Thereby discussion on the principles of application of laws and it's interpretation in administration of justice is called for.

Law is not in the law books. Books are one of the first things that come to mind when we think about law: fat texts almost too heavy to lift; dust-covered, leather-bound tomes of precedents; law libraries filled with rows and rows of statutes and judicial opinions. While books tell us a lot about the law, they are not the law. Instead, law lives in conduct, not on the printed page; it exists in the interactions of judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Think, for example, about one of the laws we most commonly encounter: the speed limit. What is the legal speed limit on most interstate highways? Someone who looked only in the law books might think the answer is 65 mph, but we know better. If you drive at 65 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike, be prepared to have a truck bearing down on you, flashing its lights to get you to pull into the slow lane. The speed limit according to drivers’ conduct is considerably higher than 65. And legal officials act the same way. The police allow drivers a cushion and never give a speeding ticket to someone who is going 66. If they did, the judges would laugh them out of traffic court. As a practical matter, the court doesn’t want to waste its time with someone who violated the speed limit by 1 mph, and as a matter of law, the police radar may not be accurate enough to draw that fine a line anyway. So what is the law on how fast you can drive? Something different than the books say.

THE work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Let some intelligent layman ask him to explain:  he will not go very far before taking refuge in the excuse that the language of craftsmen is unintelligible to those untutored in the craft. Such an excuse may cover with a semblance of respectability an otherwise ignominious retreat. It will hardly serve to still the pricks of curiosity and conscience. In moments of introspection, when there {10} is no longer a necessity of putting off with a show of wisdom the uninitiated interlocutor, the troublesome problem will recur, and press for a solution. What is it that I do when I decide a case? To what sources of information do I appeal for guidance? In what proportions do I permit them to contribute to the result? In what proportions ought they to contribute? If a precedent is applicable, when do I refuse to follow it? If no precedent is applicable, how do I reach the rule that will make a precedent for the future? If I am seeking logical consistency, the symmetry of the legal structure, how far shall I seek it? At what point shall the quest be halted by some discrepant custom, by some consideration of the social welfare, by my own or the common standards of justice and morals? Into that strange compound which is brewed daily in the caldron of the courts, all these ingredients enter in varying proportions. I am not concerned to inquire whether judges ought to be allowed to brew such a compound at all. I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life. There, before us, {11} is the brew. Not a judge on the bench but has had a hand in the making.

19. Judicial Opinions. In disposing of controverted cases, a judge should indicate the reasons for his action in an opinion showing that he has not disregarded or overlooked serious arguments of counsel. He thus shows his full understanding of the case, avoids the suspicion of arbitrary conclusion, promotes confidence in his intellectual integrity and may contribute useful precedent to the growth of the law. It is desirable that Courts of Appeals in reversing cases and granting new trials should so indicate their views on questions of law argued before them and necessarily arising in the controversy that upon the new trial counsel may be aided to avoid the repetition of erroneous positions of law and shall not be left in doubt by the failure of the court to decide such questions.

The Council of Nicæa. An ecumenical council was a new experiment. Local councils had long since grown to be a recognised organ of the Church both for legislation and for judicial proceedings. But no precedent as yet prescribed, no ecclesiastical law or theological principle had as yet enthroned, the ‘General Council’ as the supreme expression of the Church’s mind.

The final feature of emancipation’s long history was the ubiquity of violence. The reference here is not to the great explosions that echo through American history—bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s raid, or the Civil War itself—but to the ceaseless carnage that manifested itself in every confrontation between master and slave. In the clash of powerful material interests and deeply held beliefs, slaveholders and their numerous allies did not give way easily. Beginning with abolition in the North—although this was generally described as a peaceful process imbued with the ethos of Quaker quietism and legislative and judicial activism—the movement for universal freedom was one of violent, bloody conflict that left a trail of destroyed property, broken bones, traumatized men and women, and innumerable lifeless bodies. It was manifested in direct confrontations, kidnappings, pogroms, riots, insurrections, and finally open warfare. Usually, the masters and their allies—with their monopoly on violence—perpetrated much of the carnage. To challenge that monopoly required force, often deadly force; when the opponents of slavery struck back with violence of their own, the attacks and counterattacks escalated. The pattern held in the North, where there were few slaves, and in the South, where there were many. When the Civil War arrived and the war for union became a war for freedom, violence was raised to another level, but the precedent had been long established.

violations of regression assumptions, and strategies for examining and remedying such assumptions. Then we extend the preceding discussion and will be able to conclude whether the above results are valid. Again, this model is not the only model that can be constructed but rather is one among a family of plausible models. Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, other variables might have been included, too. From an empirical perspective, perhaps other variables might explain more variance. Model specification is a judicious effort, requiring a balance between theoretical and statistical integrity. Statistical software programs can also automatically select independent variables based on their statistical significance, hence, adding to R-square.2 However, models with high R-square values are not necessarily better; theoretical reasons must exist for selecting independent variables, explaining why and how they might be related to the dependent variable. Knowing which variables are related empirically to the dependent variable can help narrow the selection, but such knowledge should not wholly determine it. We now turn to a discussion of the other statistics shown in Table 15.1. Getting Started Find examples of multiple regression in the research literature. Figure 15.1 Dependent Variable: Productivity FURTHER STATISTICS Goodness of Fit for Multiple Regression The model R-square in Table 15.1 is greatly increased over that shown in Table 14.1: R-square has gone from 0.074 in the simple regression model to 0.274. However, R-square has the undesirable mathematical property of increasing with the number of independent variables in the model. R-square increases regardless of whether an additional independent variable adds further explanation of the dependent variable. The adjusted R-square (or ) controls for the number of independent variables. is always equal to or less than R2. The above increase in explanation of the dependent variable is due to variables identified as statistically significant in Table 15.1. Key Point R-square is the variation in the dependent variable that is explained by all the independent variables. Adjusted R-square is often used to evaluate model explanation (or fit). Analogous with simple regression, values of below 0.20 are considered to suggest weak model fit, those between 0.20 and 0.40 indicate moderate fit, those above 0.40 indicate strong fit, and those above 0.65 indicate very strong model fit. Analysts should remember that choices of model specification are driven foremost by theory, not statistical model fit; strong model fit is desirable only when the variables, and their relationships, are meaningful in some real-life sense. Adjusted R-square can assist in the variable selection process. Low values of adjusted R-square prompt analysts to ask whether they inadvertently excluded important variables from their models; if included, these variables might affect the statistical significance of those already in a model.3 Adjusted R-square also helps analysts to choose among alternative variable specifications (for example, different measures of student isolation), when such choices are no longer meaningfully informed by theory. Empirical issues of model fit then usefully guide the selection process further. Researchers typically report adjusted R-square with their

It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins

Stare decisis, or the custom of many legal systems that requires respect for judicial precedents, should not be confused with the irrelevant appeal to tradition. Judicial decisions provide rules and guidance for future courts. The custom of using earlier judicial decisions to guide later ones provides stability to the legal system. When deemed appropriate, judges will overturn or modify precedents, but it is generally agreed that this should be done only if there are compelling reasons to do so. It is possible, however, for someone to reject sound reasons for overturning a precedent by claiming that the precedent shouldn’t be overturned only because it is a precedent. In that case, the one arguing for keeping the precedent would be committing the irrelevant appeal to tradition.

A college student who wants to file a complaint of sexual assault within the campus disciplinary system informs a university employee such as an assistant dean for student life, or perhaps the Title IX coordinator. That person eventually forwards the complaint to a university disciplinary panel that may be composed of, for example, an associate dean with a master's degree in English literature, a professor of chemistry, and a senior majoring in anthropology. Unlike criminal prosecutors, members of the disciplinary panels do not have access to subpoena powers or to crime labs. They often have no experience in fact-finding, arbitration, conflict resolution, or any other relevant skill set. There is, to put it mildly, little reason to expect such panels to have the experience, expertise, and resources necessary to adjudicate a contested claim of sexual assault. Making matters worse, most campus tribunals ban attorneys for the parties (even in an advisory capacity), rules of procedure and evidence are typically ad hoc, and no one can consult precedents because records of previous disputes are sealed due to privacy considerations. Campus "courts" therefore have an inherently kangoorish nature. Even trained police officers and prosecutors too often mishandle sexual assault cases, so it's not surprising that the amateurs running the show at universities tend to have a poor record. And indeed, some victims' advocacy groups, such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oppose having the government further encourage the campus judicial system to primarily handle campus sexual assault claims, because that means not treating rape as a serious crime. A logical solution, if federal intervention is indeed necessary, would be for OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] to mandate that universities encourage students who complain of sexual assault to report the assault immediately to the police, and that universities develop procedures to cooperate with police investigations. Concerns about victims' well-being when prosecutors decline to pursue a case could also be adjudicated in a real court, as a student could seek a civil protective order against her alleged assailant. OCR could have mandated or encouraged universities to cooperate with those civil proceedings, which in some cases might warrant excluding an alleged assailant from campus.

narrative. The beginning of the rule of law4 – it is often said, and is largely true – in Britain coincides with the signing by King John of the Magna Carta (the Big Charter)5 in 1215. This has two key chapters, which make clear that a person cannot be punished without due process, and that such a process cannot be bought, delayed or denied. These are critical principles in our judicial system today. As it happens, Magna Carta was in force for precisely two months (when Pope Innocent III annulled it on the grounds it had been obtained by compulsion, calling it ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’), and did not directly lead to modern jury trials in any significant way. As an articulation of principles of justice, it owed much to existing texts, such as the coronation oaths of Anglo-Saxon kings and the law codes of Henry I. The Pope also called Magna Carta ‘void of all validity forever’. He was wrong. It has survived as both a romantic gesture and a useful precedent6 to cite as our courts became more professional and individual rights became more established. The more significant, but less heralded, legal development came a couple of centuries later with the articulation of the principle of habeas corpus. The full phrase is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum: ‘may you bring the body before the court’, which sounds pompous or funereal. What it means, though, is that everyone has a right to be tried in person before being imprisoned. If someone is held by the state without trial, a petition using this phrase should get them either freed or at least their status interrogated by a judge. Two Latin words contain the most effective measure against tyranny in existence. As time progressed in this country, then, we see

Getting somebody confirmed to the Supreme Court has never been a slam dunk, in part because the Court’s role in American government has always been controversial. After all, the idea of giving nine unelected, tenured-for-life lawyers in black robes the power to strike down laws passed by a majority of the people’s representatives doesn’t sound very democratic. But since Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court case that gave the Court final say on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and established the principle of judicial review over the actions of the Congress and the president, that’s how our system of checks and balances has worked. In theory, Supreme Court justices don’t “make law” when exercising these powers; instead, they’re supposed to merely “interpret” the Constitution, helping to bridge how its provisions were understood by the framers and how they apply to the world we live in today. For the bulk of constitutional cases coming before the Court, the theory holds up pretty well. Justices have for the most part felt bound by the text of the Constitution and precedents set by earlier courts, even when doing so results in an outcome they don’t personally agree with. Throughout American history, though, the most important cases have involved deciphering the meaning of phrases like “due process,” “privileges and immunities,” “equal protection,” or “establishment of religion”—terms so vague that it’s doubtful any two Founding Fathers agreed on exactly what they meant. This ambiguity gives individual justices all kinds of room to “interpret” in ways that reflect their moral judgments, political preferences, biases, and fears. That’s why in the 1930s a mostly conservative Court could rule that FDR’s New Deal policies violated the Constitution, while forty years later a mostly liberal Court could rule that the Constitution grants Congress almost unlimited power to regulate the economy.

I argue that the escalations of papal rhetoric, almost always linked directly to a Petrine claim, were often born in moments of papal anxiety or weakness. In other words, whenever a Roman bishop in this period claimed to be the primary or sole arbiter in dogmatic, moral, or judicial conflicts, especially if that claim was rhetorically bolder than those that preceded it, we would be well served to consider whether or not such a statement was uttered in response to the same bishop’s authority having been threatened, challenged, or simply ignored by a particular audience.3 As we will see, those humiliations came in many forms and from many places, both domestic and international, lay and ecclesiastical.