Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
Interpretation
Litigation should focus on achieving real-world results rather than being treated as a strategic game.
In this quote, Felix Frankfurter emphasizes that litigation, or the act of taking legal action, is fundamentally about resolving disputes and achieving practical outcomes rather than engaging in a theoretical or strategic contest like chess. The quote suggests that legal matters are serious and should prioritize the needs and rights of those involved over tactics and maneuvers typically found in games.
In practice
In a legal conference discussing the importance of focusing on resolution, one could start with this quote.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.
The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.
When I was a practising lawyer in the family court, there were too many judges who, when you left their courtroom, you didn't know whether you'd won or whether you'd lost.
The hardest problems of all in law enforcement are those involving a conflict of law and local customs. History has recorded many occasions when the moral sense of a nation produced judicial decisions, such as the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which required difficult local adjustments.
Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.
On the whole, we think of our consumers - other judges, lawyers, the public. The law that the Supreme Court establishes is the law that they must live by, so all things considered, it's better to have it clearer than confusing.
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