4161. JUDGES, Fallibility of.—
When a
cause has been adjudged according to the
rules and forms of the country, its justice
ought to be presumed. Even error in the
highest court which has been privided as
the last means of correcting the errors of
others, and whose decrees are, therefore, subject
to no further revisal, is one of those inconveniences
flowing from the imperfection of
our faculties, to which every society must
submit; because there must be somewhere a
last resort, wherein contestations may end.
Multiply bodies of revisal as you please, their
number must still be finite, and they must
finish in the hands of fallible men as judges.—
To George Hammond. Washington ed. iii, 415.
Ford ed., vi, 56.
(Pa.,
1792)
