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Law Quotes
"The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one."
21
"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."
20
"We have rule of lawyers, not rule of law. The legal profession has a monopoly over one branch of government as it was never intended to. The American Bar Association owns an entire branch of our government. We should not be surprised that we are the most litigious society in the world. It is big business with a stranglehold on one of the three branches of government."
20
"For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye."
20
"When they say whatever you say may be used against you, they mean it!"
19
"Wouldn't it be better to have a watertight law designed to catch the guilty, rather than a press release law designed to catch the headlines?"
19
"How can you pass laws about things that nobody knows?""They do it all the time," says Hayden. "That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong."
18
"Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously to answer wisely to consider soberly and to decide impartially."
18
"Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law."
18
"Public Utility Commission (PUC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complaints are rarely upheld. It is estimated that less than 5% of complaints are successful and that the actual number may be below 1% in some cases."
18
"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."
17
"The Supreme Court of the United States is no longer a court of law. It is a forum of legal fad and fashion."
17
"Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been."
17
"What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death."
17
"HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There arefour kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, andpraiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slainwhether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is foradvantage of the lawyers."
15
"We must admit thatlaw must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity."
14
"The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away."
14
"The jurist is totally unacquainted with the problem of the value of money; he knows nothing of fluctuations in its exchange-value. The naive popular belief in the stability of the value of money has been admitted, with all its obscurity, into the law, and no great historical cause of large and sudden variations in the value of money has ever provided."
14
"After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge's mercy. Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother."
14
"Litigant: a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bone."
14
"Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics."
14
"Appeal in law: to put the dice into the box for another throw."
14
"It is unreasonable to expect a known corrupt law enforcement department to uphold your legal rights."
14
"At one time, this gave rise to the question of whether the legal validity of the money was determined by the stamp of the ruler of the country or by the metal content of the coin; later, to the question of whether the command of the law or the free usage of business was to settle if the money was legal tender or not. The answer of public opinion, grounded on the principles of private property and the protection of acquired rights, ran the same in both cases: Prout quidque eontraetum est, ita et solvi debet; ut cum re eontraximus, re solvi debet, veluti cum mutuum dedimus, ut Tetro pecuniae tantundem solvi debeat."
13
"The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due."
Law,
13
"The police frequently do not enforce the rule of law."
13
"The universal law is very simple, but we look at it in a complex way."
13
"The law. Lady Frances, is an uncertain animal. It has twists and turns that surprise the non-legal mind."
13
"If you let loose a law, it willdo as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Suchsense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you haveforgotten to put into it."
13
"The world is so lawful that not even a single mosquito can touch you, as long as you do not interfere. If your interference stops, everything will stop."
13
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