Dictum Quotes

“dictum”

“Wikipedia: Dictum”

“Obiter dicta might be applied to many a volume in its entirety, to many a page of opinion for its mere prolixity.”

“An old Judge is quoted as saying, 'An obiter dictum, in the language of the law, is a gratuitous opinion, an individual impertinence.'”

“This mere obiter opinion ought not to weigh against the settled direct authority of the cases which have been deliberately and upon argument determined the other way.”

“I am not much of a dictionary maker, but I believe I could improve upon either and say, 'An obiter dictum is the passing opinion of a Judge expressed when it is not called for.'”

“I believe that obiter dicta, like the proverbial chickens of destiny, come home to roost sooner or later in a very uncomfortable way to the Judges who have uttered them, and are a great source of embarrassment in future cases.”

“Speaking for myself, I do not pay much attention to the dicta of modern Judges, as I consider it my duty to decide for myself. This, of course, does not apply to decisions of modern Judges, nor to old recognised dicta by eminent Judges.”

“There are old dicta of great Judges, which have been followed by many decisions and have become maxims of the law; but modern dicta are but attempts to embody in a short form the result of decisions or statutes which any lawyer can examine for himself.”

“Borne says, 'Nothing is permanent but change.' And so we have to say of the law. We can never rest secure upon any opinion until we have searched later reports for an opinion modifying or reversing it or declaring some of its vital parts obiter dicta.”

“Does anybody believe we can allow our presses to go on for ever belching out books that are of such value that every lawyer must know what is or what is not in the motley throng before he can feel safe? Nay, verily. There must, in some way, from somewhere, come relief.”

“How necessary it is carefully to consider the language of learned Judges, especially when you are dealing with language which is admitted to be only a dictum and not a decision, and when it is attempted to use that language for the purpose of founding on it an article of a code of law.”

“After having bowed to the supposed law, as found in an opinion of a High Court for years, we are suddenly told that the Judge who wrote the opinion was 'off his base,' so to speak, and what he said was not the law at all, or, at least, he had no business to have then said it was the law.”

“A child wandering in a cemetery, after reading the effusive inscriptions, all too superfluous after the statement that a dead man is below, asks where the bad people are buried. A reader of reports, searching for authority, sighs that so much is said when so much less would amply suffice.”

“Polonius asked Hamlet what he was reading. 'Words, words, words,' said Hamlet, and called the writer a ' satirical rogue.' Ben Butler was seen in a railroad train reading what appeared to be a law book, and was asked, 'Are you reading law, general?' 'No,' said he; 'only a volume of Massachusetts reports.'”

“In the books there are some loose dicta that an Act of Parliament and the common law should respectively stand as originals according to the circumstances of the case; but this is not law, unless it be confined to prohibitions for excess of jurisdiction and to restrain waste.— Heath, J., Jefferson v. Bishop of Durham (1797), 2 Bos. & Pull. 129.”

“The supposed great library at Alexandria was destroyed by the men of Mohammed for the, to them, satisfactory reason that if the books in it agreed with the Koran they were unnecessary, and if they did not agree with it they were unsound. Will ever some devoted advocate or some legions of such devotees of the real law—the red-eyed kind, if you please —arise and settle this question by a conflagration?”

“A great Judge was asked, 'What is the difference between law and equity?' 'Very little in the end,' responded his lordship; 'at common law you are done for at once; in equity you are not so easily disposed of. The former is a bullet which is instantaneously and charmingly effective; the latter, the angler's hook, which plays with the victim before it kills him. Common law is prussic acid, equity is laudanum.'”

“There are 166 volumes of Massachusetts reports, 165 volumes of United States Supreme Court reports, and hundreds and thousands of reports of other States. Every year adds to the reports of the Courts of this country about 250 volumes and about sixty volumes of text-books. 'Words, words, words.' Ben Butler to the contrary notwithstanding, all of these words are law unless they have been pronounced obiter dicta.”

“Whether a man goes down with a law bullet in a vital part or is wearied out as is the fish before being landed, where he may gasp his life out; whether he dies with one convulsion after a swallow of prussic acid or dreamily passes away in the solace of an opium overdraught, is perhaps no matter in the end. In the processes there is a vast difference, but the tombstones—the reports of that Court which has the last say—read very much alike. The figure is, perhaps, not a bad one.”