Learned Hand

Judge

1872-01-27

Books by Learned Hand

The spirit of liberty
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The Bill of rights
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Quotes by Learned Hand

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
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Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
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What to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination which it is not safe to thwart.
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Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
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Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
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We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after us, squandering the patrimony which we have received.
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The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.
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Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.
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We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
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Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.
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The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
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If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.
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I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.
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Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.
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Even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.
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We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life.
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Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.
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The profession of the law of which he [a judge] is a part is charged with the articulation and final incidence of the successive efforts towards justice; it must feel the circulation of the communal blood or it will wither and drop off, a useless member.
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Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.
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The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
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