Politics & Power Quote by Louis D. Brandeis

Brandeis is warning that the real defendant in a criminal trial is often the state itself. His sentence has the moral severity of a judge and the strategic mind of a dissenter: if government grants itself permission to cheat, it won’t merely catch bad people faster - it will teach the public that law is a costume, not a constraint.

The phrasing is doing deliberate work. “To declare” repeats like a gavel strike, framing the idea as an official doctrine, not a one-off lapse. He doesn’t argue that police corruption is ugly or unfortunate; he treats it as a constitutional contagion. The key inversion is in “the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal.” The private criminal is singular and contained. The government is systemic, enduring, and imitable. When it breaks the rules, it models criminality with a badge on, turning enforcement into instruction.

“Terrible retribution” is not a vague threat of divine karma. It’s political and social blowback: cynicism toward courts, retaliatory lawlessness, escalating brutality, a public trained to see rights as optional. Brandeis’s subtext is that procedural protections are not sentimental luxuries; they’re the mechanism that keeps power from becoming self-justifying.

Context matters: Brandeis wrote in an era when Prohibition, labor unrest, and expanding policing powers tempted officials to treat legality as an obstacle course. His larger project - echoed in his famous line that government is the “potent, omnipresent teacher” - insists that the state’s credibility is part of public safety. A conviction won by state misconduct may punish one offender, but it recruits countless others to the idea that rules are for the weak.