Learned Hand (1872 – 1961)
Usually called simply Learned Hand, was a famed American judge and an avid supporter of free speech, though he is most remembered for applying economic reasoning to American tort law.
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself.
How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.
We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can; for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.
We like rather to dream of a body of young men as a live thing, as a tree where all the branches are nourished by a single sap, and where each part is meaningless and incomplete except in connection with its fellows. You may lop away the dead branches, you may bend the trunk, you may dig about it and water it; but leave it to assume its own form, do not constrain the peculiar roots, or you will have a crippled, gnarled monster, and no tree.