Justice & Law Quote by Harlan Stone

Stone is quietly detonating the comforting civics-class fantasy that law equals justice. By insisting the law is "not an end in itself", he strips it of sanctimony: statutes and precedents are tools, not sacred objects. The sentence is built like a judicial syllabus. First, it denies law any intrinsic moral destination ("nor does it provide ends"), then it hands the real burden back to the people who pretend the burden belongs to the text. In other words: stop hiding behind procedure.

The subtext is both democratic and unsettling. "What we think is right" is plural, contingent, political. Stone isn’t claiming there is a single, discoverable moral truth embedded in the Constitution; he’s acknowledging that law laundered as neutral often reflects a society’s dominant values and power arrangements. That makes the line sound almost modern: law as an instrument of collective choice, not a priesthood.

Context matters. Stone, a lawyer who became Chief Justice during the New Deal era, lived through bitter fights over whether courts should strike down social legislation in the name of "principle". Read against that backdrop, this is a rebuke to formalism: legal reasoning that treats internal coherence as a substitute for moral accountability. He’s also cautioning reformers: if law is only a means, it can be turned toward humane ends or coercive ones. The elegance of the phrasing masks the warning. Law won’t save you from politics; it forces you to admit you were doing politics all along.