A Quote by William Blackstone
If [the legislature] will positively enact a thing to be done, the judges are not at liberty to reject it, for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.
A judge's role is to ensure that the legislature remains within the limits of its assigned authority under the Constitution. Judges have no authority to second-guess the wisdom of the value judgments and policy choices the legislature has made.
The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election . . . They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.
The right of the judge to inflict punishment gives him both power and opportunity to oppress the innocent; yet none but crazy men will from thence determine that it is best to have neither a legislature nor judges.
The Legislature, which was elected under the Constitution framed and supported by colored men, declared that a man having more than an eighth of African blood in his veins was ineligible to office or a seat in the Legislature of the State of Georgia.
It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive. For I agree, that "there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers." And it proves, in the last place, that as liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments.
[T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.
I believe that God has endowed men with certain inalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and that no legislature and no majority, however great, may morally limit or destroy these; that the sole function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, and anything more than this is usurpation and oppression.
A single legislature, on account of the superabundance of its power, and the uncontrolled rabidity of its execution, becomes as dangerous to the principles of liberty as that of a despotic monarch.
The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.
Our original idea was to help three or four hundred candidates in the first election run for the Ohio State legislature and the California legislature around the country.
...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".
What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.
One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint - that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid 'legislating from the bench.'
If this spirit shall ever be so far debased, as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.
If we do not elect a national legislature that will hold Obama accountable, he and his radical cohorts will destroy the tree of liberty. Just mark my words.
Related Authors
Antonin Scalia Quotes
American
Judge
Brett Kavanaugh Quotes
American
Judge
Clarence Thomas Quotes
American
Judge
Earl Warren Quotes
American
Judge
Felix Frankfurter Quotes
American
Judge
Hugo Black Quotes
American
Judge
Learned Hand Quotes
American
Judge
Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
American
Judge
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Quotes
American
Judge
Robert Rinder Quotes
English
Judge
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quotes
American
Judge
Samuel Alito Quotes
American
Judge
Sandra Day O'Connor Quotes
American
Judge
Sonia Sotomayor Quotes
American
Judge
Thurgood Marshall Quotes
American
Judge
William O. Douglas Quotes
American
Judge