Quotes About Precedent

I try not to violate what came before me and to leave lots of wiggle room for those who will follow.

Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.

Nothing could be more obscure and out of reach of the common man than a law founded on precedent....A French lawyer is just a man of learning, but an English or an American one is somewhat like the Egyptian priests, being, as they were, the only interpreters of an occult science.

Everything in life stands on what has gone before. You do this or that because, at the moment, it seems what to do. You are faced with this or that because of what happened somewhere earlier in your journey of life. What happened earlier depends on what went before that. Who would dispute that nobody stands in a void or a vacuum?

One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, today is doctrine.

A precedent provides legal authority for an action precisely because it occurred before.

In every art form, nothing exists in a bubble. It exists because of what came before it. A lot of bricks were laid. I think if it weren't for 'The Purge,' 'Get Out' wouldn't resonate as a mainstream movie. You push on the taste of the audience, in a way, get them used to something, and then you keep pushing on it.

I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.

I've done more impeachments than anybody else in the history of the country.

In the law of torts there is the maxim: Every dog has one free bite.

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.

When a head does not fulfill his commitment to customers or vendors, he only sets the precedent for subordinates to follow it as a system amongst themselves to vitiate own working environment.

The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

If you want to do good material and you're lucky enough to get a chance to do it, then chances are probably somebody pretty nifty will have been there before you.

Every man and every nation at one time or other becomes the weak. That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent. (p581)

It's been really special being part of a project that's up with the times and woke and setting a precedent for inclusion and representation.

Removing Donald Sterling from the NBA solves nothing. It sets a precedent that will likely boomerang and harm the black players and coaches who are shocked and outraged that an 80-year-old man with a documented history of bigoted actions also has bigoted private thoughts.

In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man's petty private rationality.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

There's precedent for adjudicatory proceedings on technology issues to have massive consumer and business benefits. One of the most famous was the so-called Carterfone decision in 1968.