Quotes About Law

Cops before breakfast. Before coffee even. As if Mondays weren't bad enough.

There was a line from The Lady in the Lake I could have quoted him: "Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men." When Jake recognized that he had failed to live up to his responsibility to uphold that law, he had resigned. He had had the honor and the courage to step away. Not every man had that in him; I thought probably very few men did.

However, the outcome is inconsistent with the general principle that people should not be punished in the absence of culpability, since one who acts on the basis of a reasonable mistake of law lacks moral blameworthiness.

Our moral foundation is built on the fundamental law that God (if there is a God, which there is not) would not wish to be worshipped in the perverted and misconceived ways of human beings, with their righteous violence and prejudices and hypocrisies. Doubt, or cease being moral.

And isn't it amazing that suicide is illegal when society is so indifferent to human life?

To protect his life and to prevent any felony, an Englishman was free to inflict even a mortal wound on a would-be felon.

At the end of my second year I understood something I'd been incubating for several months: that my law studies were of no interest or use to me whatsoever, for my only obsession was reading fiction and, finally, learning how to write it.

El reino de los cielos debe existir por los pobres de espíritu o la única ley de la vida es la injusticia.

Los cambios del mundo moderno también tenían que llegar, por fin, a la justicia. ¿Qué es eso de que una, dos o tres personas interpreten una ley y redacten una sentencia? Palabras y más palabras. Yo no siento que se me haya hecho justicia. Solo yo sé qué castigo me puede satisfacer.

La fe es por definición incomprensible. Dios no obedece a la ley ordinaria".

Why should joy be banned forever? Why do they think that thinking is a crime? Why do they put clamps on ideas? The Law's judgments should rest on facts alone, proven, consummated facts.

It does away with a lot of complaints that 'We Were Also Done Wrong,' from the Irish or other minorities, precisely because it recognizes the fundamental difference. African Americans were kept down by the force of law, not custom, and then every effort to lift the burden of the law was met with denial of due process.

I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his theory about disobeying the law," Marshall said in an interview years later. "I didn't believe in that. I thought you did have a right to disobey the law, and you also had a right to go to jail for it, and he kept talking about Henry David Thoreau, and I told him that Thoreau wrote his book ["Civil Disobedience"] in jail. If you want to write a book, you go to jail and write it.

a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

Second, marriage is an issue that our Founding Fathers wisely left to the states.

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

Das Recht ist kein Kreißsaal für die Gerechtigkeit und hat niemals behauptet, einer zu sein. Das Recht besteht aus Gesetzen, Gesetze bestehen aus Wörtern, und Wörter können manches sein, sicher aber nicht gerecht.

Nach dem demokratischen Verständnis muss der Maßstab jeder Aburteilung abstrakt sein. Das folgt aus dem Verbot von Einzelfallgesetzen. [...] Wozu sollte das Abstrakte uns dienen, wenn nicht als Maßstab für Aburteilungen?

truth is subjective, even in a court of law. Knowing and believing are remarkably similar — if not, in fact, the same.

Congress should clarify that a sitting president is not subject to criminal indictment while in office.

An indictment is not a conviction.

Whether the Constitution allows indictment of a sitting president is debatable.

This demonstration of power, indifferent to the law, is highly dangerous.