"Every lawyer of experience comes to know (more or less unconsciously) that in the great majority of cases, the precedents are none too good as bases of prediction. Somehow or other, there are plenty of precedents to go around."
"Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization."
Source: Jerome Frank (1930). “Law and the Modern Mind”, p.261, Transaction Publishers
About the author
Jerome Frank
Psychologist
Jerome Frank was a prominent psychiatrist known for his influential work on psychotherapy and the importance of patient narratives in healing.
All quotes by Jerome Frank →Same author
More quotes by Jerome Frank
"Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts."
"Justice is what the judge ate for breakfast."
"To the somnambulist, sleep-walking may seem more pleasant and less hazardous than wakeful walking, but the latter is the wiser mode of locomotion in the congested traffic of a modern community. It is about time to abandon judicial somnambulism."
"Only a very foolish lawyer will dare guess the outcome of a jury trial."
"Any treatment of an illness that does not also minister to the human spirit is grossly deficient."