John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge Quotes

To me the entire uselessness of such rules^as practical guides lies in the inherent vagueness of the word "reasonable," the absolute impossibility of finding a definite standard, to be expressed in language, for the fairness and the reason of mankind, even of Judges. The reason and fairness of one man is manifestly no rule for the reason and fairness of another, and it is an awkward, but as far as I see, an inevitable consequence of the rule, that in every case where the decision of a Judge is overruled, who does or does not stop a case on the ground that there is, or is not, reasonable evidence for reasonable |men, those who overrule him say, by implication, that in the case before them, the Judge who is overruled is out of the pale of reasonable men.

As a lawyer I am before and above all things for the supremacy of law.

It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.

What is one man's gain is another's loss.

It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one.

However much men may honestly endeavour to limit the exercise of their discretion by definite rule, there must always be room for idiosyncracy; and idiosyncracy, as the word expresses, varies with the man. But there is, besides this, that of which every student of legal history must be aware, the leaning of the Courts for a certain time in a particular direction, balanced at least, if not reversed, by the leaning of the Courts for a certain time in a direction opposite. The current of legal decision runs often to a point which is felt to be beyond the bounds of sound and sane control, and there is danger sometimes that the retrocession of the current should become itself extreme.

A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship.

I think there should be no occasion on which it is absolutely, as a point or rule of law, impossible for a man to redeem his character.

I must lay down the law as I understand it, and as I read it in books of authority.

As long as we have to administer the law we must do so according to the law as it is. We are not here to make the law.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views on those most sacred things, that he should be branded as apparently criminal because he differed from the majority of mankind in his religious views or convictions on the subject of religion. If that were so, we should get into ages and times which, thank God, we do not live in, when people were put to death for opinions and beliefs which now almost all of us believe to be true.

We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.

I am sure from my experience of juries that, in a criminal case especially, they will obey the law as declared by the Judge; they will take the law from the Judge, whether they like it or do not like it, and apply it honestly to the facts before them.

It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.