The maxim dates at least to 1837, when a judge, ruling in favor of a parent against the maintenance of her children, said, "We have heard that hard cases make bad law.
[5] The legal scholar Glanville Williams questioned the adage's usage in 1957, writing, "It used to be said that 'hard cases make bad law'—a proposition that our less pedantic age regards as doubtful.
But in the present case it has been prayed in aid to do injustice on a large scale—to defeat the intentions of a dead man—to deprive his children of the benefits he provided for them—and to expose his estate to the payment of tax of over £600,000.
[7][8][9] In his discussion of the converse, the jurist John Chipman Gray saw legal professionals as subject to the temptation of valuing the "logical coherency of the system itself" over the well-being of individuals.
[7] The legal scholar Arthur Linton Corbin, writing in 1923, reversed the adage in an article entitled "Hard Cases Make Good Law": When a stated rule of law works injustice in a particular case; that is, would determine it contrary to 'the settled convictions of the community,' the rule is pretty certain either to be denied outright or to be undermined by a fiction or a specious distinction.