Word.ws English Dictionary

bad facts make bad law

bad facts make bad law proverb: unusual circumstances can lead lawmakers or judges to set precedent that applies poorly to most situations.

Proverb

bad facts make bad law

  1. Unusual circumstances can lead lawmakers or judges to set precedent that applies poorly to most situations.
    • The tired adage "bad facts make bad law" is given new life in a recent decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court.2004, Eugene Soar, “McKinney v. Richitelli: Abandoning Parents and Presumptive Penalties”, in North Carolina Central Law Review, volume 26, number 2, retrieved 13 Dec 2014
    • Just as "bad facts make bad law," so too odd facts make odd law.1992, Clarence Thomas, (Please provide the book title or journal name)

Forms of bad facts make bad law

alternative formbad facts, bad law
alternative formeasy cases at times produce bad law

Questions about bad facts make bad law

What does bad facts make bad law mean?
Bad facts make bad law means unusual circumstances can lead lawmakers or judges to set precedent that applies poorly to most situations.
What part of speech is bad facts make bad law?
Bad facts make bad law is a proverb.

Words near bad facts make bad law in the dictionary

  1. bad eggs
  2. bad ending
  3. bad endings
  4. bad eye
  5. bad eyes
  6. bad facts make bad law
  7. bad faith
  8. bad feeling
  9. bad feelings
  10. bad for the coo
  11. bad form

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bad facts make bad law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bad facts make bad law.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bad_facts_make_bad_law. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.