"If the courts are making the decisions, it matters who the judge is and, of course, people are concerned with what is the bottom line"
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Pragmatism is doing most of the work here: if courts are the ones deciding, the real policy lever isn’t abstract “justice” but the person in the chair. Harrison’s line sounds almost obvious, and that’s the point. It strips away the comforting civics-myth that law is a neutral machine and replaces it with a blunt engineering truth: outcomes depend on components. For an inventor, this is a natural way to think. Systems produce results; swap a part, the output changes. In a courtroom, the “part” is the judge.
The subtext is mildly corrective, even a little suspicious. It assumes decisions aren’t merely discovered by applying rules; they’re shaped by temperament, incentives, and ideology. That’s why “people are concerned” with the “bottom line” - a phrase that imports the language of accounting and enterprise into legal life. He’s acknowledging what polite society often pretends not to notice: litigants and the public care less about doctrinal purity than about who wins, who loses, and what precedent or penalty follows.
Contextually, a 1693-1776 lifespan places Harrison in an era when courts were central to property, patents, commerce, and political authority - precisely the arenas that would touch an inventor’s livelihood. The sentence reads like a layperson’s realism hardening into a worldview: in disputes that determine fortunes, appointments are destiny. It’s not anti-law so much as anti-naivete. The line works because it compresses a large institutional critique into everyday language, making elite power (judicial selection) sound like common sense, which is how it often survives.
The subtext is mildly corrective, even a little suspicious. It assumes decisions aren’t merely discovered by applying rules; they’re shaped by temperament, incentives, and ideology. That’s why “people are concerned” with the “bottom line” - a phrase that imports the language of accounting and enterprise into legal life. He’s acknowledging what polite society often pretends not to notice: litigants and the public care less about doctrinal purity than about who wins, who loses, and what precedent or penalty follows.
Contextually, a 1693-1776 lifespan places Harrison in an era when courts were central to property, patents, commerce, and political authority - precisely the arenas that would touch an inventor’s livelihood. The sentence reads like a layperson’s realism hardening into a worldview: in disputes that determine fortunes, appointments are destiny. It’s not anti-law so much as anti-naivete. The line works because it compresses a large institutional critique into everyday language, making elite power (judicial selection) sound like common sense, which is how it often survives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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