Politics & Power Quote by Warren E. Burger

Burger’s line is a rebuke wrapped in bureaucratic poetry: justice can’t just be an idea in a law review footnote, it has to move. “Hands and feet” turns an abstract civic virtue into a body with chores, deadlines, and a budget. The metaphor is doing heavy lifting. It quietly admits what courts hate to confess out loud: a right delayed is often a right denied, and a right priced out is just another kind of denial.

The insistence on “every case” is the tell. Burger isn’t romanticizing landmark decisions; he’s talking about the daily grind of arraignments, family court, small claims, routine criminal dockets. That’s where legitimacy is won or lost, not in Supreme Court mythology. “Shortest possible time” and “lowest possible cost” reads like a management memo, and that’s the point. Burger, as Chief Justice during an era of swelling caseloads and growing skepticism toward institutions, treated court administration as democracy’s plumbing: invisible until it fails.

The subtext is a warning to the legal profession’s prestige economy. Lawyers can luxuriate in complexity; judges can hide behind procedure; the system can congratulate itself on principle while ordinary people hemorrhage time and money. Burger reframes efficiency as moral, not merely technical. If justice is a public good, then friction, delay, and expense aren’t unfortunate side effects - they’re ethical defects.

Calling it “the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America” spreads the responsibility broadly, but also subtly shifts blame: if the system is unjust in practice, it’s not the Constitution’s fault. It’s ours.