The Nature of the Judicial Process

“The spirit of the age, as it reveals itself to each of us, is often only the spirit of the group into which we have fallen by the accident of birth, education, occupation, or collegial association. No effort or revolution of the mind can wholly and for all time overthrow the dominion of these subconscious loyalties (...) We are by nature hopelessly credulous and instinctively accept the verdicts of the group. We are vain, not only when under the spell of an excited crowd, but everywhere and always; we listen to the still, small voice of the herd and are ever ready to defend and justify its instructions and warnings and to accept them as the mature results of our own reasoning. This was written not specifically about judges, but about men and women of every class. The training of a judge, if joined with what is called the judicial temperament, will to some extent help him to emancipate himself from the suggestive force of individual dislikes and prejudices. (...) Yet so long as human nature remains what it is, these loyalties will never entirely disappear. We may sometimes wonder how, from the interplay of all the aforesaid forces of individualism, anything coherent can emerge at all, anything other than chaos and ineffectiveness. These are the moments in which we exaggerate the elements of difference. In the end, however, there emerges from them something that has order, and truth, and coherence.”
Author: Benjamin N. Cardozo