Justice & Law Quote by George Sutherland

Sutherland’s line reads like a calm civics lesson, but it’s really a power move: a Supreme Court justice blessing tax avoidance as not merely tolerable, but unimpeachably legitimate. The phrasing is doing the heavy lifting. “Cannot be doubted” isn’t argument so much as foreclosing argument. It turns a contested moral question into a settled legal axiom, the kind of declarative certainty that courts use to launder ideology into doctrine.

The intent is narrowly legalistic: to separate evasion (illegal) from avoidance (legal). Yet the subtext is broader and distinctly class-coded. By framing the taxpayer’s goal as “decrease” or “altogether avoid” taxes, Sutherland normalizes the most aggressive form of minimization as a rational exercise of rights. Taxes become a default extraction “otherwise” owed, not a democratically chosen contribution. The citizen is recast as a rights-bearing optimizer; the state is the adversary whose reach must be cabined by technical compliance.

Context matters. Sutherland served in an era when corporate power, wealth concentration, and skepticism of regulation were hotly litigated, and the Court often treated economic liberty as a constitutional value. This sentence fits that worldview: legality is the bright line, and the sophistication to exploit “means which the law permits” is implicitly respectable. It also hints at a quiet institutional shrug: if loopholes exist, that’s Congress’s problem.

The quote endures because it captures the American compromise in one crisp rule: morality is optional, but paperwork is sacred.