Sublime

At the close of Russell’s 1938 speech against lynching legislation, Borah of Idaho walked over to him and congratulated him—and then took the floor himself to echo Russell’s argument that the bill was a violation of states’ rights. (Whereupon Russell rose in his turn to say, “The people of the South will ever revere the name of William E. Borah.”)

Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base mot

The judges, however, wisely rejected that argument, quoting Thurgood Marshall's observation that given the mysteries of human motivation, “it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not discriminate against other members of their group.”

“Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its g

What Lincoln had shown was the practicality, in politics, of a moral standard. I mean by this an external frame of reference that shapes interests and actions, not—like Douglas’s—an internal one that only reflects them. Lincoln’s didn’t arise from faith, or formal ethics, or even the law, a profession necessarily pragmatic in its pursuit of justice

Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson felt, had used the law against him, not the law in its majesty but the law in its littleness; Johnson had relied on its letter to defy its spirit. Stevenson had first sought justice from the people who knew the truth best, the Jim Wells Democratic Committee itself—and that committee had been willing to give him what he sou

‘In my opinion,’ said Lydgate, ‘legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better tha