“Our course of advance … is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes.”

—  Benjamin N. Cardozo

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)
Context: Our course of advance... is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes, compromises often … between "positivism and idealism". The notion that a jurist can dispense with any consideration as to what the law ought to be arises from the fiction that the law is a complete and closed system, and that judges and jurists are mere automata to record its will or phonographs to pronounce its provisions.

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Benjamin N. Cardozo photo
Benjamin N. Cardozo52
United States federal judge 1870–1938

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