Daily Inspiration Quote by Learned Hand

Law, in Learned Hand's view, is not a cathedral of fixed meanings; it's a weather system. "Words are chameleons" is a judge's way of puncturing the comforting fantasy that statutes and constitutions contain their answers like coins sealed in glass. A chameleon doesn't change its nature, but it does change its appearance to fit the terrain. Hand is warning that language, especially legal language, takes its shade from the setting: the facts of a case, the era's moral panic or reformist zeal, the institutional incentives of courts, even the audience a judge imagines reading the opinion.

The line works because it smuggles a critique inside a seemingly neutral metaphor. Chameleons "reflect" rather than "choose", shifting the burden from individual bad faith to the conditions that make certain readings feel inevitable. It's a sly rebuke to literalism and to the idea that interpretation is mere technical plumbing. When a term like "reasonable", "liberty", or "commerce" appears in a dispute, it rarely arrives alone; it drags in social expectations and power arrangements that tint what "reasonable" can plausibly mean.

Hand wrote and judged through the churn of industrial capitalism, two world wars, and the New Deal: periods when American institutions were renegotiating the boundaries of state power and individual rights. His metaphor captures that instability without sounding partisan. It's also a caution to judges themselves. If words absorb their environment, then courts are part of that environment, not above it. The "color" isn't just out there in society; it's on the bench, in the courthouse, in the culture that decides which meanings count as common sense.