The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the hierarchy of laws, asserting that constitutional law takes precedence over statutes, and statutes take precedence over judge-made law.
In this quote, Benjamin N. Cardozo articulates the legal principle that the Constitution is the supreme law, and any statute enacted by legislators must align with it to be valid. Judge-made law, or common law, is derived from judicial decisions and is considered secondary to the laws that are established through the legislative process. This hierarchy is crucial for maintaining the rule of law and the accountability of the legal system to the democratic process.
In practice
In a legal seminar discussing the roles of different branches of government.
Lawsuits are rare and catastrophic experiences for the vast majority of men, and even when the catastrophe ensues, the controversy relates most often not to the law, but to the facts. In countless litigations, the law Is so clear that judges have no discretion.
History or custom or social utility or some compelling sense of justice or sometimes perhaps a semi-intuitive apprehension of the pervading spirit of our law must come to the rescue of the anxious judge and tell him where to go.
There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them, and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion.
Law never is, but is always about to be.
The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
On their deathbed men will speak true, they say.
Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail.
What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?
It is impossible that there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the Earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
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