None of my peers avoided prison. None of ‚em.

More law, less justice.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

‚Getting smart on crime‘ does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

You’re innocent until proven guilty.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

When you’re in prison, you want to know that you were thought about.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

Law is mind without reason.

On the whole, we think of our consumers – other judges, lawyers, the public. The law that the Supreme Court establishes is the law that they must live by, so all things considered, it’s better to have it clearer than confusing.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes… You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror.

It’s cool to be recognised by your peers.

Due process should matter.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

Algorithms diminish public safety in this country. They ask us to pretend that lengthy arrest records and violent crimes don’t matter. They ask police to scoop up the bad guys only for the courts to immediately release them. They turn us into a bad joke.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Law, without force, is impotent.

Law is always better than war.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

Justice Scalia and I served together on the D.C. Circuit. So his votes are not surprising to me. What I like about him is that he’s very funny and very smart.

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.

On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone’s life.

Arizona presents no specific reason for excepting capital defendants from the constitutional protections extended to defendants generally, and none is readily apparent.

You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‚shooting an unarmed child,‘ when that ‚child‘ was beating him bloody.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.