Daily Inspiration Quote by Lord Patrick Devlin

Devlin’s line lands with the quiet snap of a bench gavel: of course a judge needs “judgment,” and yet the fact that it needs saying is the point. The “curiously enough” is doing the real work. It’s a needle slipped under institutional self-importance, hinting that courts can get hypnotized by everything adjacent to judging: procedure, precedent, etiquette, the theater of neutrality. Devlin reminds the legal world that none of that substitutes for the core faculty the job supposedly exists to exercise.

The taut redundancy is strategic. By stripping the idea down to a single word, Devlin reframes judging as something closer to moral and practical discernment than to rule-application. “Judgment” here isn’t just producing an outcome; it’s weighing incomplete facts, resisting fashionable certainty, sensing the human costs that statutes don’t itemize. In mid-20th-century Britain, where Devlin was influential not only as a Law Lord but as a public moralist, that emphasis carries an edge. His broader work often argued that law inevitably entangles with communal values; this quip smuggles that argument into a minimalist aphorism.

There’s also a warning tucked inside the pleasantry: if judges don’t cultivate judgment, they will fall back on the safest impersonation of it. They will mistake consistency for wisdom, deference for restraint, and legal jargon for legitimacy. Devlin’s “curiously enough” suggests he’d seen that slippage up close. The line flatters the profession just enough to be quoted, then undercuts it: the hardest part of judging can’t be automated, outsourced, or hidden behind a robe.