Justice & Law Quote by Lamar S. Smith

Its cleanest trick is how it smuggles a contested philosophy into a civics-class platitude. "Interpret" sounds neutral, almost clerical; "make" sounds muscular, ideological, suspect. By pairing them, Lamar S. Smith frames judges not as co-equal actors in a living system but as technicians who should keep their hands off the machinery. The line is a political boundary marker disguised as common sense.

The specific intent is less about courtroom method than about democratic control. Smith, speaking as a legislator, casts lawmaking as the proper domain of elected officials and paints judicial decision-making that recognizes new rights, adapts old statutes to new technologies, or reads broad constitutional language expansively as a kind of power grab. The subtext is grievance: when courts reach outcomes a political coalition dislikes, the problem is not the outcome but the legitimacy of the route taken.

Context matters because American law is built on interpretation all the way down. Statutes are ambiguous, precedents conflict, and the Constitution is famously general. Judges inevitably "make" law in the sense that their rulings create operative rules for everyone else. The quote works rhetorically by collapsing that messy reality into a moral binary: faithful umpire versus unelected legislator. It's a compact way to delegitimize unpopular decisions without arguing the details, and to signal alignment with textualism/originalism while keeping the argument emotionally legible to voters.