Top 15 John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge Quotes

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

A difficult form of virtue is to try in your own life to obey what you believe to be God's will.

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

Law grows, and though the principles of law remain unchanged, yet (and it is one of the advantages of the common law) their application is to be changed with the changing circumstances of the times. Some persons may call this retrogression, I call it progression of human opinion.

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.

The moment juries or judges go beyond their functions, and take upon themselves to lay down the law or find the facts, not according to the law as it is, but according to the law as they think it ought to be, then the certainty of the law is at an end; there is nothing to rely upon; we are left to the infinite variety and uncertainty of human opinion; to caprice which may at any moment influence the best of us, to feelings and prejudices, perhaps excellent in themselves, but which may distort or disturb our judgment, and distract our minds from the single simple operation of ascertaining whether the facts proved bring the case within the law as we are bound to take it.

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.

We must follow the old authorities and precedents in criminal matters.

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.

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

We are now Courts of equity, and must decide the thing according to all the rights.

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

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.

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.