"Serve without fear or favor"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

> Judge John Roberts said this, but who said it  first?

Barry's favorite journalist addressed this in his "On Language" column in
1995:

"In the lobby of the Times building on 43d Street in Manhattan is Vincenzo
Miserendino's bust of Adolph S. Ochs, who purchased the newspaper 99 years
ago, a fact to be celebrated by his descendants and their colleagues with
appropriate hoo-ha next year. With the bust is this excerpt from his
credo, expressed in his opening issue in 1896: 'To give the news
impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or
interest involved.'

Rudyard Kipling, 10 years after the Ochs usage, popularized the phrase in
a poem: 'That we, with Thee, may walk uncowed/By fear or favor of the
crowd.' Before Ochs, a Judge McCaleb told a Federal grand jury in 1846,
'The wise, human and salutary enactments of Congress must be respected and
enforced without fear or favor.' Fred R. Shapiro of the Yale law library,
who is editor of the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations, finds
an even earlier citation in a legal data base: 'The tenure of their
offices,' a legislative committee of the Commonwealth of Virginia declared
in 1810, referring to United States Supreme Court justices, 'enables them
to pronounce the sound and correct opinions they may have formed, without
fear, favor or partiality.'"

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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