Robert H. Jackson

The office of the lawyer, however poorly filled, is too delicate, personal and confidential to be occupied by a corporation.

— Robert H. Jackson

Our people do not want barren theories from their democracy. Maury Maverick has expressed very quaintly, but clearly, what they really want when he says: 'We Americans want to talk, pray, think as we please — and eat regular'.

— Robert H. Jackson

Often his name was, in a generation or two, forgotten. It was from this brotherhood that America has drawn its statesmen and its judges. A free and self-governing Republic stands as a monument for the little-known and unremembered as well as for the famous men of our profession.

— Robert H. Jackson

I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments in every case. First came the one I had planned – as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented – interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night…

— Robert H. Jackson

On your first appearance before the Court, do not waste your time and ours telling us so. We are likely to discover for ourselves that you are a novice but will think none the less of you for it. Every famous lawyer had his first day at our bar, and perhaps a sad one…. Be respectful, of course, but also be self-respectful, and neither disparage yourself nor flatter the Justices. We think well enough of ourselves already.

— Robert H. Jackson

Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to wide and considered self-government,

— Robert H. Jackson

When the Court moved to Washington in 1800, it was provided with no books, which probably accounts for the high quality of early opinions.

— Robert H. Jackson

When we went to school we were told that we were governed by laws, not men. As a result of that, many people think there is no need to pay any attention to judicial candidates because judges merely apply the law by some mathematical formula and a good judge and a bad judge all apply the same kind of law. The fact is that the most important part of a judge's work is the exercise of judgment and that the law in a court is never better than the common sense judgment of the judge that is presiding.

— Robert H. Jackson

Something happens to a man when he puts on a judicial robe, and I think it ought to. The change is very great and requires psychological change within a man to get into an attitude of deciding other people's controversies, instead of waging them. It really calls for quite a changed attitude. Some never make it - and I am not sure I have.

— Robert H. Jackson

The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation, than any other person in America.

— Robert H. Jackson

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

— Robert H. Jackson

If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.

— Robert H. Jackson

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

— Robert H. Jackson

Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a Trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man.

— Robert H. Jackson

There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out.

— Robert H. Jackson

Not every defeat of authority is a gain for individual freedom, nor every judicial rescue of a convict a victory for liberty.

— Robert H. Jackson

A Government to perform even a minimum of service to its people, must take steps to suppress avarice, to strike down privately built-up schemes of economic exploitation or oppression, to uproot privilege, and to assure justice and economic opportunity to the masses.

— Robert H. Jackson

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.

— Robert H. Jackson

No longer may the head of a state consider himself outside of the law, and impose inhuman acts on the peoples of the world.

— Robert H. Jackson

The power of citizenship as a shield against oppression was widely known from the example of Paul's Roman citizenship, which sent the centurion scurrying to his higher-ups with the message: "Take heed what thou doest: for this man is a Roman."

— Robert H. Jackson

The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact — constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color.

— Robert H. Jackson

It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.

— Robert H. Jackson

This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added.

— Robert H. Jackson

Civil liberties had their origin and must find their ultimate guaranty in the faith of the people. If that faith should be lost, five or nine men in Washington could not long supply its want.

— Robert H. Jackson

As to ethics, the parties seem to me as much on a parity as the pot and the kettle. But want of knowledge or innocent intent is not ordinarily available to diminish patent protection.

— Robert H. Jackson

A confession is wholly and incontestably voluntary only if a guilty person gives himself up to the law and becomes his own accuser.

— Robert H. Jackson

I do not know whether it is the view of the Court that a judge must be thick-skinned or just thick-headed, but nothing in my experience or observation confirms the idea that he is insensitive to publicity. Who does not prefer good to ill report of his work? And if fame — a good public name — is, as Milton said, the "last infirmity of noble mind", it is frequently the first infirmity of a mediocre one.

— Robert H. Jackson

The Court's reasoning adds up to this: The Commission must be sustained because of its accumulated experience in solving a problem with which it had never before been confronted! I give up. Now I realize fully what Mark Twain meant when he said, 'The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.'

— Robert H. Jackson

Under these circumstances, except for any personal humiliation involved in admitting that I do not always understand the opinions of this Court, I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday.

— Robert H. Jackson

But we have grounds to assume also that the normal proportion of them are subject to that very human weakness, especially displayed in Washington, which leads men to "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning."

— Robert H. Jackson

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

— Robert H. Jackson

But when notice is a person's due, process which is a mere gesture is not 'due process.'

— Robert H. Jackson

But we must not forget that in our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds — that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

— Robert H. Jackson

Our protection against all kinds of fanatics and extremists, none of whom can be trusted with unlimited power over others, lies not in their forbearance but in the limitations of our Constitution.

— Robert H. Jackson

I think that, under our system, it is time enough for the law to lay hold of the citizen when he acts illegally, or in some rare circumstances when his thoughts are given illegal utterance. I think we must let his mind alone.

— Robert H. Jackson

I am entitled to say of that opinion what any discriminating reader must think of it — that it was as foggy as the statute the Attorney General was asked to interpret.

— Robert H. Jackson

But an escape less self-depreciating was taken by Lord Westbury, who, it is said, rebuffed a barrister's reliance upon an earlier opinion of his Lordship: "I can only say that I am amazed that a man of my intelligence should have been guilty of giving such an opinion". If there are other ways of gracefully and good-naturedly surrendering former views to a better considered position, I invoke them all.

— Robert H. Jackson

The petitioner's problem is to avoid Scylla without being drawn into Charybdis.

— Robert H. Jackson

It is only the words of the bill that have presidential approval, where that approval is given. It is not to be supposed that in signing a bill the President endorses the whole Congressional Record.

— Robert H. Jackson

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

— Robert H. Jackson

Had the jury convicted on proper instructions it would be the end of the matter. But juries are not bound by what seems inescapable logic to judges.

— Robert H. Jackson

We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.

— Robert H. Jackson

No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a President can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming his military role.

— Robert H. Jackson

He who must search a haystack for a needle is likely to end up with the attitude that the needle is not worth the search.

— Robert H. Jackson

Reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done. There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.

— Robert H. Jackson

We granted certiorari, and in this Court the parties changed positions as nimbly as if dancing a quadrille.

— Robert H. Jackson

But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.

— Robert H. Jackson

The duty to disclose knowledge of crime rests upon all citizens.

— Robert H. Jackson

Government of limited power need not be anemic government. Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and by making us feel safe to live under it makes for its better support.

— Robert H. Jackson

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

— Robert H. Jackson

Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.

— Robert H. Jackson

We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

— Robert H. Jackson

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

— Robert H. Jackson

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

— Robert H. Jackson

I should say the defendants have done just that for which they are indicted. If I might agree to their conviction without creating a precedent, I cheerfully would do so. I can see in their teachings nothing but humbug, untainted by any trace of truth. But that does not dispose of the constitutional question whether misrepresentation of religious experience or belief is prosecutable; it rather emphasizes the danger of such prosecutions.

— Robert H. Jackson

It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.

— Robert H. Jackson

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion — except for the sect that can win political power.

— Robert H. Jackson

If we concede to the State power and wisdom to single out "duly constituted religious" bodies as exclusive alternatives for compulsory secular instruction, it would be logical to also uphold the power and wisdom to choose the true faith among those "duly constituted." We start down a rough road when we begin to mix compulsory public education with compulsory godliness.

— Robert H. Jackson