Quotes about law

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

We need clear rules to play the game. We need to have respect for the law. If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you can change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is that interesting? This game is not right, but who is going to say, 'Hey, let’s play fairly?'

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Power over the rules is real power. That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution – the rules for writing the rules – has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.

Leland Weston: "Never take a position unless you are certain it can be defended any onslaught. That may sound like good advice to a general, but then, a courtroom is nothing more then a very civilized war."

I had seen a great deal of barristers by now. I realized that their profession was closely akin to that of actors, and that insincerity was the stock-in-trade of most of them. But how could they be sincere, alternating as they did between Crown and defence, knowing the tricks of both sides? It would be as unreasonable to expect sincerity from a prostitute. Year in, year out, these men stood, now on one side, now on the other, pleading the cause of the Crown and criminal with equal vehemence. At the end of a long career at the Bar they must have become like stones, washed clean of all sympathy, all hope for humanity, all regard for truth – and it was then, by a singular stroke of irony, that they were made into judges.

There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent.

There is one law for rich and poor alike, which prevents them equally from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.

We live so much of our lives in chaos. Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order: everything from language to religion to law to science tries to impose a framework on chaotic existence. The existentialists, sometimes wrongly described as disbelieving in an underlying order, saw the risks and the foolishness of the obsession with creating one. Hitler showed the risk, as did any number of populist tyrants before him. I teach my students that law, too, shows the risk, when we try to regulate a phenomenon—human behavior—that we do not even understand. I am not arguing against law...but against the Panglossian assumption that we can ever do law particularly well. The darkness in which we live dooms us to do it badly.

They are unfettered by precedent in the administration of justice. Customs have been handed down by ages of repetition, but the punishment for ignoring a custom is a matter for individual treatment by a jury of the culprit’s peers, and I may say that justice seldom misses fire, but seems rather to rule in inverse ratio to the ascendency of law. In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.