Thursday, November 09, 2023

Infallible

Reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done.  There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed.  We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.

-- Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892 - 1954), United States Solicitor General (1938-1940), United States Attorney General (1940–1941) and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941–1954).  He is the only person in US history to have held all three of those offices, concurring in Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 540 (1953)

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