"This sort of thing reminds one of what Artemus Ward said in his lecture on the Mormons: 'One of the principal features of my entertainment is that it contains so many things that don't have anything to do with it.' We have been succeeding or failing because of something in an opinion which turns out to have no right to a place in the judicial utterance. A man who has carefully wound up his clock every night for twenty years and then learns that it is an eight-day clock has less reason for feeling bad than a lawyer who has lost a case or been guided in advice given by something that turns out to be obiter."
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Dictum
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