Hogan’s r-right whin he says: “Justice is blind.” Blind she is, an’ deef an’ dumb an’ has a wooden leg.

Finley Peter Dunne put this line into the mouth of his famous Chicago saloon-keeper, Martin J. “Mr. Dooley” (often spelled “Dooly”), a persona Dunne used in newspaper columns around the turn of the 20th century to satirize American politics, courts, and public hypocrisy in Irish-American dialect. The remark belongs to Dooley’s recurring theme that lofty civic ideals—like impartial justice—collapse in practice under class privilege, political influence, and institutional incompetence. The joke’s piling-on (“blind… deef an’ dumb… has a wooden leg”) intensifies the sense that the justice system is not merely impartial but incapacitated, unable to see, hear, speak, or move effectively.

The quote twists the conventional emblem “Justice is blind,” which is meant to praise impartiality, into an indictment: justice is not nobly indifferent to status but functionally disabled. By adding deafness, muteness, and a wooden leg, Dunne suggests a system that cannot perceive evidence, cannot listen to testimony, cannot speak truth, and cannot act decisively—especially when power or money is involved. The humor is bitter: the familiar civic metaphor becomes a portrait of institutional failure. In Dooley’s voice, the line also signals working-class skepticism toward courts and officials, implying that those who most need justice experience it as absent or ineffective rather than fair.