Quotes About Law

Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.

Now, I'd like to ask people in the room, please raise your hand if you have not broken a law, any law, in the past month... That's the kind of society I want to build. I want to guarantee — with physics and mathematics, not with laws — that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.

I don't feel stupid, just inadequate. After three years of studying the law, I'm very much aware of how little I know.

All students enter law school with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after three years of brutal competition we care for nothing but the right job with the right firm where we can make partner in seven years and earn big bucks.

that material like Hammurabi's stele imposed no obligations on society or the courts. It did not represent at any level the "law of the land," and there is no call to obey. This assessment is confirmed by the fact that it does not serve as a reference in the judicial system, which is illuminated for us through thousands of court documents.

When the legal treatises are viewed in this light, one can propose that these are not laws, but exemplary verdicts that can serve the intended didactic function.[9] It is in this sense that they offer model justice. To go the next step, one can infer that not only is what we find in documents such as Hammurabi's stele not a "code," it is not even "law." These are not legislative documents. They report verdicts, they do not prescribe laws.

You may juggle human laws, you may fool with human courts, but there is a judgment to come, and from it there is no appeal. —ORIN PHILIP GIFFORD1

Thanks to a skewed court system, the offender gets more sympathy than the victim of his crime. Police officers are put on trial for doing their duty against a criminal with a rap sheet that reaches to the floor. Who's the one who broke the law—the criminal or the policeman? Police officers are investigated while criminals write books that make them rich, famous, and features them on television talk shows.

The last word smelled of desperation,and the old lawyer sighed. 'I can tell you that the law is an ocean of darkness and truth, and that lawyers are but vessels on the surface. We may pull one rope or another, but it is the client, in the end, who charts the course.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue for ever, and never have an end.

Renard was obliged to report ruefully to his master that the laws of England were so unsatisfactory that it was impossible to have people executed unless they had previously been proved guilty.

Belief is an odd thing for a defense counsel, Tommy. It is not necessary to believe in your client to defend him. Some would say that it is easier to not truly have an opinion, that the maneuverings of the law are only clouded by the emotions of trust and honesty. But

La ventaja de ser abogado en lugar de, pongamos por caso, psicoanalista es que los abogados trabajan en un mundo desprovisto de certeza. Vivimos en el mundo de la persuasión.

Weve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.

The Americans will see you. God knows why, but they will.' 'You have a way of making it sound as though they're above the law,' said Troy. 'What you don't grasp, Troy, is that they run things now.

John Lescroart

In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so.

Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog.

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity" Ch.2, 8

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.