Justice & Law Quote by Harold H. Greene

Greene is making an argument for the quiet, unglamorous machinery of liberal democracy: not that courts deliver perfect justice, but that the mere presence of a credible legal off-ramp changes a nation’s emotional weather. “I think it does work” is almost comically restrained for a claim with revolutionary stakes. The humility is strategic. A judge can’t preach utopia; he can testify to function. His emphasis on “the fact that the law is there” treats legality less as a moral code than as infrastructure: a standing invitation to contest power without burning the house down.

The subtext is deterrence-by-legitimacy. If people believe grievances can be heard and “rectified,” frustration doesn’t have to metastasize into the kind of collective despair that makes violence feel rational. Greene’s comparative glance at “some of these places in Eastern Europe” situates the remark in the late Cold War’s long shadow, when brittle regimes advertised order while denying citizens dependable channels for redress. He’s not romanticizing America; he’s diagnosing a pressure system. Where courts are perceived as captured, arbitrary, or absent, politics becomes a zero-sum street fight. Where courts are available and intermittently effective, anger can be converted into procedure.

There’s also a judge’s self-justification embedded here, a defense of the institution’s social role: courts as a shock absorber between inequality and upheaval. It’s an argument for incrementalism, yes, but not complacency. The line quietly warns that legitimacy is a finite resource. If “rectified” becomes a promise people stop believing, the revolution he treats as distant starts to look like a backlog come due.