Robert H Jackson Quotes

Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.

The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." [West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)]

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Your job today tells me nothing of your future--your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.

[A]ny lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON, 1950

Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.

The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. —Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.

Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.

The German organized plundering, planned it, disciplined it, and made it official just as he organized everything else, and then he compiled the most meticulous records to show that he had done the best job of looting that was possible under the circumstances. And we have those records.

There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One s right to life liberty and property to free speech a free press freedom of worship and assembly and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote they depend on the outcome of no elections.

But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, “the State”, which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.

There is a danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact

Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. (Robert H. Jackson, Justice at Nuremberg)

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason.

Robert H. Jackson declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

Nov. 20, 1945: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson is the chief American prosecutor as the International Military Tribunal convenes in Nuremberg, Germany, for the trial of 20 top Nazi leaders for their role in the wartime atrocities of World War II.

Their responsibility is . . . great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, ‘the State,’ which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.” —Robert H. Jackson

Such “pyrrhic victories” are of course ubiquitous in the development of U.S. tax law, leading the late Justice Robert H. Jackson to quip that tax is “a field beset with invisible boomerangs.” Arrowsmith v. Commissioner, 344 U.S. 6, 12 (1954) (Jackson, dissenting). See Kirk J. Stark, The Unfulfilled Tax Legacy of Justice Robert H. Jackson, 54 Tax L. Rev. 171, 251-256 (2001). To carry the evolutionary story further, one might observe that the development of the tax law is sometimes characterized by a process similar to evolutionary phenomenon of “antagonistic pleiotropy,” a condition where a single gene influences more than one trait—one with beneficial effects and the other with harmful effects. In a similar way, a single legal rule will often have pro-taxpayer and pro-government effects, depending on the class of taxpayer. Thus, in the same way that a gene selected for some beneficial trait might carry with it some other harmful trait, government efforts through litigation to push the development of a legal rule (e.g., the scope of the “realization” doctrine) in one direction with respect to one class of taxpayers (e.g., taxpayers with gains) will sometimes have the opposite effect on another class of taxpayers (e.g., taxpayers with losses). A fuller “evolutionary” theory of the development of U.S. tax law might seek to account for such phenomena.

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”   —Robert H. Jackson, Nuremberg prosecutor (1945)

Nuremberg war crimes trials of the surviving leaders of the National Socialist regime. During the trial, one defense that many of the accused articulated was that everything done on their orders had been directly or indirectly sanctioned by the German state. The law was the law, and the moral rightness or wrongness of the law was consequently not relevant. The prosecution responded by maintaining that while this may have been the case, such actions were not only rendered illegal by international law, but were called into question by strong Western legal philosophical traditions which emphasized that there are indeed universal laws which no positive law (no matter how firmly sanctioned by the state) can annul. The chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson (a Justice of the United States Supreme Court and a firm believer in natural law), contended that the International Military Tribunal sought to “[rise] above the provincial and transient and [sought] guidance not only from international law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations” (Jackson, 1947: part 2, 29).

Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers, Robert Utley’s Lone Star Justice, and Mike Cox’s Wearing the Cinco Peso: A History of the Texas Rangers.

Robert H. Jackson, Nuremberg prosecutor (1945)

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only a unanimity at the graveyard.” ~ Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1945) Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.