Quotes about law

In your profession you must have met lots of very rich self-made men, as rich as or even richer than Zander. They always tend to regard themselves as a little above the law, wouldn't you say?

'The law punishes the criminal after he has been successful: it is no use to us.'

As to any other laws that slave-holders may make among themselves, as respecting slaves, they can be of no better kind, nor give them any better character, than what is implied in the common report—that there may be some honesty among thieves.

A solicitor is a man who does worse things within the law than most crooks do outside it.

When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.

I never believe anything that a lawyer says when he has a wig on his head and a fee in his hand. I prepare myself beforehand to regard it all as mere words, supplied at so much the thousand. I know he‘ll say whatever he thinks most likely to forward his own views.

No doubt he had acted in direct opposition to the spirit of the injunction, but legal orders are read by the letter, and not by the spirit.

Rights and rules, which are bonds of iron to a little man, are packthread to a giant.

The more time I spent in jail, the more I realized that the law isn’t rational at all. It’s a lottery. What color is your skin? How much money do you have? Who’s your lawyer? Who’s the judge?

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”