Daily Inspiration Quote by Irving R. Kaufman

A judge rarely gets to speak in his own voice; he gets paraphrased. Kaufman’s line is a complaint, but it’s also a quiet diagnosis of how democratic legitimacy is manufactured. Courts issue opinions meant to be read as precise, internally consistent arguments. The public, meanwhile, meets those opinions as a headline, a chyron, a “win” or “loss” framed for speed. When Kaufman says he is “forced” to reach his audience through the press, he’s admitting an uncomfortable dependence: judicial authority rests on public acceptance, yet the court’s main translator operates on a different set of incentives.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “For the most part” is judicial restraint even in self-defense, a hedged indictment. “Medium of the press” casts journalism less as watchdog than as conduit, implying the judge’s words must travel through a channel that can distort the signal. The sting lands in “all too often inaccurate and superficial,” a pairing that suggests two failures at once: factual error and flattening. One breaks trust; the other breaks understanding.

Context matters. Kaufman served in an era when federal courts were expanding their reach into civil liberties, national security, and high-salience political questions. Those rulings demanded public comprehension, yet mass media was evolving toward spectacle and compression. The subtext isn’t merely “reporters get it wrong.” It’s that in a media ecosystem built for immediacy, the judiciary’s slow, footnoted logic becomes culturally illegible. And when legal reasoning becomes illegible, power migrates to whoever can narrate it fastest.