Daily Inspiration Quote by Irving R. Kaufman

Kaufman is warning that the judiciary can become a machine for risk management: always reach for the safest precedent, always decide less than you could, always write an opinion that cannot be attacked. That posture looks like humility, even “restraint,” but he frames it as professional self-harm. The judge who never exercises judgment beyond the well-worn groove loses the muscle for it. “Atrophies” is a brutal biological metaphor for what the legal culture often treats as virtue. He’s saying the mind doesn’t stay neutral by avoiding big questions; it gets smaller.

The subtext is an internal critique of how judges are trained and rewarded. Precedent is supposed to stabilize the law, but it can also become an alibi: a way to dodge moral and civic responsibility while claiming fidelity to method. “Narrowest grounds” signals the familiar appellate habit of minimalism, the idea that courts should decide only what they must. Kaufman doesn’t reject restraint outright; he’s arguing that routinized restraint becomes intellectual cowardice, a bureaucracy of opinions that prizes defensibility over clarity.

Context matters because Kaufman lived through mid-century American law when courts were forced to confront civil rights, national security, and the expanding administrative state. In those eras, choosing the “secure” path isn’t just a style choice; it can decide whether courts remain a co-equal branch or retreat into procedural tidiness while power moves elsewhere. His line is less about judicial ego than judicial capacity: a legal system that teaches its arbiters to think small will eventually produce decisions that are small when the moment demands scale.