Talk:Hard cases make bad law

Untitled
Googling suggests that the first to state it was []: anyone have a ref? 79.70.120.37 (talk) 15:18, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

I am unaccustomed to editting wikipedia. I've done a google book search for "hard cases make bad law". Limiting the search for years before 1833, and excluding qoutes to find inexact matches: https://www.google.com/search?q=hard+cases+make+bad+law&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1833&tbm=bks

There seem to be a few earlier examples than the one in the article, going back to at least 1764. 71.213.165.151 (talk) 16:58, 7 March 2019 (UTC)


 * There is a persistent problem with Google Books that tends to crop up whenever you are looking for the earliest example of something. It often turns out that the "oldest" source is actually a case of a book being miscataloged, and the actual date of publication is much later than the date stated by Google. Sometimes this is caused by a simple misreading by the OCR; sometimes it is caused by a periodical being cataloged according to its first issue rather than the issue in question; sometimes I can't identify a cause.
 * From your search results, I found that:
 * “Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of ..., Volume 26” cataloged by Google as 1829 is actually from 1841;
 * “Records and Briefs of the United States Supreme Court” cataloged by Google as 1832 is actually from 1924;
 * “United States Reports” cataloged by Google as 1754 is actually from 2006;
 * and so on. However, I have not finished checking all these sources, and I have found a couple that are correctly dated. I will post more information later. Jim Dixon 55104 (talk) 19:08, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The oldest example I can find is: “It has been often said to be the hard case which makes bad law” found in
 * “An Inquiry Into the Present State of the Civil Law of England” by John Miller (of Lincoln's Inn) (London: John Murray and Charles Hunter, 1825), page 313
 * https://books.google.com/books?id=EuUGAAAAQAAJ &dq=%22hard+cases%22+%22bad+law%22 Jim Dixon 55104 (talk) 04:53, 19 June 2023 (UTC)