War & Peace Quote by Irving R. Kaufman

A court with no army and no purse has to win its authority the hard way: by persuading the public that its judgments deserve obedience. Kaufman’s metaphor makes that fragility feel physical. “Armor” and “ammunition” are the language of force, yet he assigns the Supreme Court only symbolic gear: a “cloak of public trust” and “collective hopes.” The subtext is a warning disguised as reverence. If the Court’s protection is a garment, it can be tugged off; if its firepower is hope, it can run out.

Kaufman, a federal judge speaking from inside the judiciary’s priesthood, is also drawing a boundary around the institution’s legitimacy. He doesn’t claim the Court is omniscient or even always right; he claims it is functionally dependent. The line is a quiet rebuke to politicians who treat rulings as just another partisan volley, and to justices tempted to act as if their titles insulate them from consequence. Public trust here isn’t PR; it’s the mechanism by which rulings become reality. Compliance, not coercion, is the system.

The historical context matters: Kaufman’s career spans the Warren Court’s rights revolution, Vietnam-era protests, Watergate’s constitutional stress test, and the conservative turn that followed. In that long churn, the Court’s power repeatedly hinged on whether Americans still accepted the idea of neutral law. The rhetoric is almost devotional, but the message is transactional: legitimacy is borrowed, not owned, and it can be foreclosed.