A far greater factor than abolishing poverty is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty and - at some point - finality of judgment.
– Warren E. Burger
Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.
– Warren E. Burger
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. This is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
– Warren E. Burger
Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.
– Warren E. Burger
Doctors still retain a high degree of public confidence because they are perceived as healers. Should lawyers not be healers? Healers, not warriors? Healers, not procurers? Healers, not hired guns?
– Warren E. Burger
For better or worse, editing is what editors are for; and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors-newspaper or broadcast-can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is no reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.
– Warren E. Burger
Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.
– Warren E. Burger
Guilt or innocence becomes irrelevant in the criminal trials as we flounder in a morass of artificial rules poorly conceived and often impossible to apply.
– Warren E. Burger
However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises.
– Warren E. Burger
It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to discover a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.
– Warren E. Burger
It is not possible to arrange for any broadcast of any Supreme Court proceeding, but when you get the Cabinet meetings on the air, call me.
– Warren E. Burger
It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house.
– Warren E. Burger
Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.
– Warren E. Burger
Respondent's expectation that his garden was protected from observation is unreasonable and is not an expectation that society is prepared to honor.
– Warren E. Burger
The courtrooms of America all too often have Piper Cub advocates trying to handle the controls of Boeing 747 litigation.
– Warren E. Burger
The president's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.
– Warren E. Burger
The trial of a case is a three-legged stool - a judge and two advocates.
– Warren E. Burger
There can be no assumption that today's majority is right and the Amish and others like them are wrong. A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.
– Warren E. Burger
There can be no doubt that the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has become part of the fabric of our society.
– Warren E. Burger
There may be some incorrigible human beings who cannot be changed except by God's own mercy to that one person.
– Warren E. Burger
To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.
– Warren E. Burger
We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians.
– Warren E. Burger
We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.
– Warren E. Burger
We must have a program to learn the way out of prison.