Daily Inspiration Quote by Learned Hand

"Thou shalt not ration justice" lands like a commandment because it borrows the moral authority of scripture to shame a very modern temptation: treating fairness as a scarce commodity to be portioned out when convenient. Learned Hand, a federal judge who watched the American state expand through war, economic crisis, and the rise of administrative power, knew how easily legal rights get reframed as luxuries. The line’s genius is its refusal to bargain. "Ration" is the language of emergency governance: wartime shortages, bureaucratic triage, the quiet acceptance that some people will have to do with less. Hand drags that logic into the courtroom and condemns it.

The subtext is pointedly institutional. Courts, prosecutors, and legislators often justify shortcuts in the name of efficiency, public safety, or national unity. Hand is warning that once justice becomes something to be meted out by capacity and convenience, it stops being justice and becomes management. The archaic "thou shalt" isn’t decorative; it’s a deliberate escalation. He’s not offering advice about better policy. He’s setting a red line and framing its violation as a kind of civic sin.

It also reads as a rebuke to public mood. Democracies routinely ration sympathy, too: certain defendants are deemed undeserving of due process; certain groups are told to wait their turn. Hand’s phrase insists that equal protection isn’t a budget item. If a system can’t deliver justice without portioning it, the problem isn’t that justice is too expensive; it’s that the system has lost the plot.