If judges are so full of levity, so full of timidity, if they are influenced by such mean and unworthy passions that a popular clamor is sufficient to shake the resolution they build upon the solid basis of a legal principle, I would endeavor to fix that mercury by a positive law.
Burke critiques the influence of public opinion on judges and advocates for a stable legal framework.
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They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.
We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
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