Proceedings of the Bar and Officers of the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, November 26, 1938

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Page 39 - Judges march at times to pitiless conclusions under the prod of a remorseless logic which is supposed to leave them no alternative. They deplore the sacrificial rite. They perform it, none the less, with averted gaze, convinced as they plunge the knife that they obey the bidding of their office. The victim is offered up to the gods of jurisprudence on the altar of regularity.
Page 42 - If you ask how he is to know when one interest outweighs another, I can only answer that he must get his knowledge just as the legislator gets it, from experience and study and reflection ; in brief, from life itself.
Page 51 - The judicial function is exhausted with the discovery that the relation between means and end is not wholly vain and fanciful, an illusory pretense.
Page 45 - of perversion in constitutional theory is the tyranny of labels. Out of the vague precepts of the Fourteenth Amendment a court frames a rule which is general in form, though it has been wrought under the pressure pf particular situations.
Page 38 - The roads to human power and to human knowledge lie close together, and are nearly the same; nevertheless, on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of dwelling on abstractions, it is safer to begin and raise the sciences from those foundations which have relation to practice and let the active part be as the seal which prints and determines the contemplative counterpart.
Page 46 - ... hold to the ancient dogma that the law declared by its courts had a Platonic or ideal existence before the act of declaration, in which event the discredited declaration will be viewed as if it had never been, and the reconsidered declaration as law from the beginning. . . . The choice for any state may be determined by the juristic philosophy of the judges of her courts, their conceptions of law, its origin and nature.
Page 42 - History or custom or social utility or some compelling sentiment of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law, must come to the rescue of the anxious judge, and tell him where to go.
Page 38 - It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works; since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument.
Page 90 - In any work so vast and intricate, what is to be looked for is not absolute accuracy, but an accuracy that will mark an advance upon previous uncertainty. If every doubt as to the extent and form of valuation is to be dispelled by mandamus, the achievement of the ends of Congress, already long deferred, will be put off till the Greek Kalends.
Page 93 - Under these decisions the separation of powers between the Executive and Congress is not a doctrinaire concept to be made use of with pedantic rigor. There must be sensible approximation, there must be elasticity of adjustment, in response to the practical necessities of government, which cannot foresee today the developments of tomorrow in their nearly infinite variety.

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