Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

Hughes is giving dissents a kind of afterlife, and the line lands because it treats judicial losing as delayed winning. Coming from a judge, it’s less inspirational poster than institutional diagnosis: courts don’t just “find” law, they stage it, with today’s majority as only the temporary cast. The phrase “in a number of cases” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It’s modest, almost statistical, which keeps the sentiment from sounding like romantic rebellion. He’s not claiming the dissenter is always right; he’s insisting the system must preserve the possibility that the majority is wrong.

The subtext is strategic legitimacy. A dissent is a pressure valve for a court that wants to look principled rather than purely political. It tells the public (and future judges) that alternative reasoning existed, that the decision wasn’t inevitable, that law is argument over time. Hughes also signals to the bench itself: write dissents with care because you may be drafting tomorrow’s doctrine. The dissent becomes a memo to the future, aimed at later courts, legislators, and social movements looking for language sturdy enough to carry a change in consensus.

Contextually, Hughes lived through an American judiciary wrestling with industrial capitalism, labor conflict, and the early administrative state, eras when constitutional meanings were visibly contested and frequently revised. His line captures that churn without naming it. The cleverness is its restraint: it dignifies dissent not as obstruction, but as a seed bank for legal evolution, a record of conscience that can mature into authority when history catches up.