Justice & Law Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

An appeal, in Finley Peter Dunne's hands, isn’t a solemn march toward justice; it’s an institutional side-eye. The line turns legal procedure into a social drama, where courts behave less like neutral engines of reason and more like rival clubs guarding their status. The joke lands because it’s only a half-joke: anyone who’s watched law up close knows that appellate review can feel like a polite vocabulary for correcting, scolding, or outright undoing someone else’s work.

Dunne, a journalist and satirist of civic life, is puncturing the mythology that the judiciary is purely dispassionate. By describing an appeal as a request for “contempt,” he spotlights the hierarchy baked into the system. Trial courts do the messy, time-pressed work of fact and credibility; appellate courts arrive later, cleaner, armed with doctrine and distance. The subtext is that “error” is often a proxy for power: who gets to define what counts as a mistake, and whose judgment is presumed more refined.

Historically, this quip sits comfortably in an era when American institutions were professionalizing and consolidating authority, selling themselves as rational and above politics. Dunne’s wit refuses the sales pitch. He’s also giving the public a translation key: legal language can launder ego, class, and institutional rivalry into something that sounds like principle. The line endures because it captures a modern suspicion: even our most respectable systems run on human incentives, and they rarely miss a chance to prove who’s smarter in the room.