Quotes About Judiciary

It's never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions - whether they derive from faith or anywhere else - on the law.

I think my legacy will be in what most people don't like about me: my style - the separation between judge and lawyers, judge and politics, the real independence of the judiciary from the executive, from the legislative, from money. I'm criticized in Brazil because of that. In the end, I hope to prevail.

It is a fundamental principle that every institution must be accountable to an authority which is independent of that institution. Yet somehow, the judiciary has propagated a view that the judiciary can only be accountable to itself.

One of the principles upon which the E.U. is built is the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary.

Our federal resources, our U.S. marshals, and the federal court system are being used, I think, by the private sector.

And in that confirmation process, I sat for 17 hours in front of a senate judiciary committee.

Maduro distanced himself from democracy. He deconstructed the entire judiciary and blocked parliamentary processes.

As a district judge, I view my role quite differently than the role of legislators.

Our system presumes that there are certain principles that are more important than the temper of the times. And you must have a judge who is detached, who is independent, who is fair, who is committed only to those principles and not public pressures of other sort. That's the meaning of neutrality.

A judge who announces a decision must be able to demonstrate that he began from recognized legal principles and reasoned in an intellectually coherent and politically neutral way to his result. Those who would politicize the law offer the public, and the judiciary, the temptation of results without regard to democratic legitimacy.

If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of "human rights" to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did—to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by "people's courts." Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.

Would a treaty ratified by Congress trump state law? Could the judiciary override the legislature? And would America function as a true country or a loose federation of states? Hamilton left no doubt that states should bow to a central government: "It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.

This doctrine vastly expanded judicial discretion and opened a loophole large enough to tolerate many trusts.

In 1807, Burr was arrested for treason and for trying to incite a war against Spain. He was acquitted by Chief Justice John Marshall, who applied a strict definition of treason. The acquittal only sharpened Jefferson's contempt for "the original error of establishing a judiciary independent of the nation

Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of riding the circuit.

Adams made baldly partisan selections for a judiciary already packed with Federalists. His appointment of the so-called midnight judges rubbed old Republican wounds.

Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801.

For Hamilton, Jefferson's desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: "Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolish the judges at pleasure destroys the independence of the judicial department and swallows it up in the impetuous vortex of legislative influence?"34 Without an independent judiciary, the Constitution was a worthless document.

And in the Senate, Oliver Ellsworth took the lead in drafting a judiciary act that provided for a six-member Supreme Court, buttressed by federal district and circuit courts.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations."63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing that "there was hardly a political question in the United States that did not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."1

None of the politicking of this first judicial nomination was lost on the street-smart Sotomayor. Less than two years after she was sworn in as a district court judge, she told a conference focused on women in the judiciary, 'It is a political appointment. [People] have to make themselves known. You simply do not put in an application.

The far left's mockery of the competitive institutions of "bourgeois democracy" and capitalism, its cynicism about the possibility of any objectivity in the media, the civil service, or the judiciary, has long had a right-wing version too. Hitler's Germany is the example usually given. But there are many others, from Franco's Spain to Pinochet's Chile.