Justice & Law Quote by Arthur J. Goldberg

Goldberg’s line reads like a judicial warning shot fired at the Cold War’s trigger finger. “Law not served by power is an illusion” refuses the comforting fantasy that rights enforce themselves. Courts can write opinions; without the machinery of the state to carry them out, law becomes decorative language, a constitution as coffee-table book. He’s insisting on the unglamorous truth that legitimacy needs muscle: police, budgets, international enforcement, political will.

Then he pivots and tightens the vice. “Power not ruled by law is a menace” is the counterweight, aimed at the same institutions he just empowered. The syntax is a deliberate balance beam: he grants power its necessity, then cages it. That’s the subtextual move of a jurist who understands that the modern state’s greatest temptation is to treat necessity as permission.

The “nuclear age” tag matters. It turns an abstract separation-of-powers lesson into a species-level stakes argument. In a world of ICBMs and brinkmanship, unbounded executive action isn’t just a civil-liberties problem; it’s an extinction risk. Goldberg, a Supreme Court Justice and a former UN ambassador, is speaking from the era’s central anxiety: that technological capacity had outrun moral and legal restraint.

The intent is less kumbaya than calibration. He’s sketching a two-part requirement for survival: law must be enforceable, and enforcement must be law-bound. Anything else is either theater or terror, and the bomb makes both intolerably expensive.