Quotes About Law

To modern man,' Hayek argues, 'the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.

the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits.

The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control the individual but to free him. The

Furthermore, we can understand those basic freedoms as rights partly because we can understand the reciprocal duty to respect them. My right to life is your duty not to kill me: and duties of non-encroachment and non-infliction are naturally upheld by morality and easily enforced by the law. However

Accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession.

el comunismo que preconizaba Marx entraña una contradicción: es una situación en la que se disfruta de todas las ventajas que tiene el orden legal, pero no existe la ley; en la que se logran todos los beneficios de la cooperación social, a pesar de que nadie goza de esos derechos de propiedad que, hasta la fecha, han sido los que han hecho posible precisamente la cooperación.

accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.

I almost forgot to tell you - you have the right to remain silent, but if you do, my boys at the station will process your bones to help you confess.

To be jealous is to conform...To reject jealousy is to transgress a law.

This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

Dodd, do you often act for both sides in a case?

Still, he wondered whether republican government could withstand popular frenzy and instill the deep respect for law and authority that obtained in monarchical systems and that would safeguard liberties.

He turned to Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, a bespectacled Republican with a grizzled beard, who was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard College and Law School. A former member of the Free-Soil Party, an upright gentleman of starchy integrity, he had served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court where he used sarcasm to savage lesser mortals. "When on the bench," wrote an observer, "he was said to be unhappy because he could not decide against both litigants.

In January 1803, a grand jury in Columbia County, New York, indicted Harry Croswell for seditious libel against President Jefferson.

The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December.

The American Revolution had succeeded because it was "a free, regular and deliberate act of the nation" and had been conducted with "a spirit of justice and humanity." It was, in fact, a revolution written in parchment and defined by documents, petitions, and other forms of law.

I thought justice ground real slow in Texas." "Only if you plead not guilty.

ginning up municipal revenue with a radar gun out on the highway, now prowling

Stupidity isn't a capital crime. And there's no death penalty here, anyway. There is now.

Audibility decays according to the inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet.

foreign legal systems. So I made

There would have been ten squad cars there in a thin minute.