Justice & Law Quote by Floyd Abrams

Abrams is doing something rare for a star litigator: deflating the hero myth. The line starts with a shrug toward the unglamorous machinery of outcomes "the facts and the law" then adds the third rail most courtroom narratives try to ignore: "who the judges are". That last clause is the tell. It quietly admits that adjudication is not a sterile math problem; it is filtered through temperament, ideology, institutional incentives, and the accident of assignment. Coming from a First Amendment heavyweight, this reads less like false modesty than a strategic insistence on realism.

The subtext is a corrective to the way American culture tells legal stories, from prestige TV to campaign-season rhetoric. We like our victories personalized: a brilliant advocate outwits the system, a single argument turns history. Abrams pushes back by reframing litigation as a multiplayer game with rule-bound constraints and uneven terrain. By saying lawyers "sometimes exaggerate", he indicts his own profession's marketing habits the closing argument as brand-building, the press quote as part of the case. It's also a subtle rebuke to clients and movements that want certainty: hire the right counsel, and justice follows.

Context matters: Abrams built a career defending speech in cases where the public expects moral clarity. His point is that rights are not granted by charisma. They survive (or don't) at the intersection of evidence, doctrine, and the human beings in robes. The line doesn't diminish lawyers; it disciplines them, reminding everyone that courts are institutions, not stages.