Judiciaries

"The CCP has long presented the Chinese citizenry with a strict social contract: the CCP enjoys an absolute political monopoly in exchange for providing steadily increasing standards of living. That means no elections. That means no unsanctioned protests. That means never establishing an independent legal or court system which might challenge CCP whim. It means firmly and permanently defining “China’s” interests as those of the CCP."

"The biggest advantage the Chinese government has over us is that it doesn’t have to contend with constitutional democracy. The second-biggest advantage it has is that it doesn’t have to be hypocritical, and pretend that it is not doing, and would not do, what it clearly and unapologetically is."

"The day I arrived was about a week after the July 9 crackdown on [civil] rights lawyers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a watershed moment in Chinese politics. It shaped the China I would experience over the next several years."

"have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed."

"Chinese Communists were no more inclined to respect individual liberties when they ran one of the poorest and most insular nations in the world. If anything, they acted with even more brutality. No state has ever murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and terrorized more of its own people."

"According to statistics compiled in 2003, only 1 to 5 percent of trials in China have witnesses. The conviction rate in criminal trials is 99.7 percent. The criminal code names sixty-eight crimes that are punishable by death, including embezzlement, counterfeiting, bribery, pimping, stealing gasoline, and selling harmful foodstuffs. Exact annual figures for the number of executions in China is not known, although it appears to be in the thousands. Amnesty International's cautious estimate for 2005 was 1,770. The majority of the world's executions take place in China. In March 2004, the government introduced traveling "execution vans.""

"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric…. A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government."

"Let me try to state in a nutshell how I view the work of judging. My approach, I believe, is neither liberal nor conservative. Rather, it is rooted in the place of the judiciary, of judges, in our democratic society. The Constitution’s preamble speaks first of we, the people, and then of their elected representatives. The judiciary is third in line and it is placed apart from the political fray so that its members can judge fairly, impartially, in accordance with the law, and without fear about the animosity of any pressure group. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, “The mission of judges is to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” I would add that the judge should carry out that function without fanfare, but with due care. She should decide the case before her without reaching out to cover cases not yet seen. She should be ever mindful as judge. And then Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo said, “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”"

"Without a functional judicial system, we have no recourse or accountability. Justice in Pakistan is delayed and denied."

"If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,… the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there, in this view, any assault upon the court, or the judges. It is a duty, from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them; and it is no fault of theirs, if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes."

"I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States."

"John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!"

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."

"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow,) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little to-morrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."

"The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them."