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"The market tends to pay as a wage what an individual laborer is worth. But the case last studied suggests the question how accurately the law operates in practice. May it not be an honest law, but be so vitiated in its working as to give a dishonest result?"
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"Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone."

"The laws of men are not infallible."

"There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders."

"Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another throw."

"The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away."

"When they say whatever you say may be used against you, they mean it!"

"The law is logical and is based on common sense. The trick was to argue the law in favor of your particular point of view without sounding biased. It was kind of like a magic trick: the best illusionist being the one who can best manipulate the logic to his or her advantage, all the while giving the illusion of impartiality."

"Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."
Explore more quotes by John Bates Clark

"The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system."

"If the adjustment made by a court can be accepted or not, it will be refused whenever the men can gain more by continuing the strike, with whatever of violence that involves."

"Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor."

"We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service."

"Dull would be the man who should merely tolerate this plan of social industry. Weak would be the position of him who should take an apologetic tone in defending it, or present its claims in a merely negative way, by exposing the evils and perils of the socialistic plan."

"Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions."

"A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable."

"If a man were living in isolation his income would be literally his product. Make him the monarch and owner of an island, and the fruits that he raises and the clothing that he makes constitute, in themselves, his income. This ceases to be true when trading begins."

"In a recent decision of the Supreme Court, not made, however, by the full court, and concurred in by only four justices, it was held that the seller of a patented mimeograph could bind the purchaser to use only his ink in the machine, though the ink was not patented."

"When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty."
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