It is the professional duty of the judge to validate the law’s claim to validity, to sacrifice his own sense of the right to the authoritative command of the law, to ask only what is legal and ask not if it is also just.

The proper role of the judiciary is one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it.

[T]ake it to be the bounden duty of the Judge to lay down the law as it strikes him, and that of the jury to accede to it, unless they have superior knowledge on the subject.

There may be cases in which there is so much of difficulty in knowing where the law stands that we take time to consider, and sometimes doubt much and sometimes differ among ourselves. But I believe every one of the Judges acts upon the principle that he is before man and God in the discharge of his duty, and acts upon his solemn oath, and declares tbe law not according to any political fancy, or for the purposes of serving one party or serving another, but according to the pure conviction of his own mind without looking to any party.

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.

I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed. I do well understand the difference between legislating and judging. As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy.

"Robert Bork, at opening of Judiciary hearings:
How should a judge go about finding the law? The only legitimate way, in my opinion, is by attempting to discern what those who made the law intended...
As I wrote in an opinion for our court, the judge's responsibility "is to discern how the framers' values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply in the world we know.
If a judge abandons intentions as his guide, there is no law available to him, and he begins to legislate a social agenda for the American people. That goes well beyond his powers..

Judges ought to remember that their office is to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.

Let me try to state in a nutshell how I view the work of judging. My approach, I believe, is neither liberal nor conservative. Rather, it is rooted in the place of the judiciary, of judges, in our democratic society. The Constitution’s preamble speaks first of we, the people, and then of their elected representatives. The judiciary is third in line and it is placed apart from the political fray so that its members can judge fairly, impartially, in accordance with the law, and without fear about the animosity of any pressure group. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, “The mission of judges is to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” I would add that the judge should carry out that function without fanfare, but with due care. She should decide the case before her without reaching out to cover cases not yet seen. She should be ever mindful as judge. And then Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo said, “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.

A Judge cannot set himself above the law which he has to administer, or make or mould it to suit the exigencies of a particular occasion.

The Judge is intrusted with the liberties of the people, and his saying is the Law.

We don't pay judges to think; we pay judges to rule on the law.

My duty is, as a Judge, to be governed by fixed rules and former precedents.