Justice & Law Quote by John Marshall Harlan

A cold splash of institutional humility: Harlan warns that even America’s most venerated text has limits, and that courts, however robed in moral authority, are a bad substitute for politics. The line works because it punctures a familiar civic fantasy - that if we can just “constitutionalize” a problem, we can skip the messy work of persuading fellow citizens, bargaining with legislatures, or building durable coalitions. “Panacea” is pointed medicine-talk: he’s diagnosing a national habit of treating the Constitution like a cure-all rather than a framework with sharp edges and intentional silences.

The second sentence is the real boundary stone. Harlan insists the Court was “ordained as a judicial body,” not an all-purpose engine of progress. That word “ordained” carries a double charge: it sounds almost sacred, while being used to limit the Court’s mission. Subtext: if reformers turn the judiciary into a “general haven,” they risk politicizing it, draining legitimacy from decisions that depend on public acceptance, and encouraging a cycle where every defeated cause is refiled as a constitutional grievance.

Context matters. Harlan served during the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism, labor conflict, segregation, and new regulatory ambitions collided with an activist Supreme Court and growing public impatience. His caution reads like a rebuttal to legal moralism: noble ends do not automatically authorize judicial means. It’s not anti-reform so much as a reminder that democratic change is supposed to be hard - and that when courts become the shortcut, they also become the battleground.