Justice & Law Quote by Harold H. Greene

In Greene's mouth, "sterile" is the tell: a judge describing the law as medically clean, technically correct, and emotionally dead. The line is a defense of judging as a moral craft, not a clerical function. He frames the "letter of the law" as something that can be followed with a straight face even when it produces an outcome that feels wrong, while "justice" is cast as the animating purpose the text is supposed to serve. It's a quiet rebuke to a legal culture that can hide behind procedure and call it neutrality.

The subtext is institutional: American courts are perpetually pulled between legitimacy (we apply rules consistently) and conscience (we live with the consequences). Greene signals he knows the danger of sounding like a philosopher-king, so he hedges with "more or less" and "where it was possible". Those qualifiers do real work. They acknowledge constraints: appellate review, precedent, statutory language, the need to look principled rather than personal. He's not claiming the right to improvise; he's claiming the responsibility to interpret.

Context matters because Greene is best known for U.S. v. AT&T in the 1970s, where he mediated a high-stakes conflict between corporate power and government surveillance. In that world, the law's "letter" can become a tool for the already powerful, while "justice" is what keeps a courtroom from turning into a compliance desk. The quote flatters neither side: the law without justice is sterile; justice without law is unaccountable. Greene is staking out the narrow, consequential space between them.