Quotes About Law

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

What our investigation has shown is that the real problem, the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police—that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support.

That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.

La vita è missione ed il dovere è la sua legge suprema».

Soltanto affrontando la mafia per quello che è - un'associazione criminale seria e perfettamente organizzata - saremo in grado di combatterla.

The judges are a big problem. Law is equal for everyone, except for them.

The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.

Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.

Bush violated FISA [...] because he wanted to violate the law in order to establish the general 'principle' that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.

But even when the principle of equal treatment was betrayed, American leaders in every era have emphatically affirmed it, not so much out of hypocrisy as out of aspiration. Indeed, for those who were devoted to justice, the persistence of inequality was precisely what made equality before the law so imperative.

Abused in this way, law becomes a tool—both domestically and internationally—by which the powerful can coerce and control the powerless, rather than a system for ensuring that all are subjected to common rules. Nowhere

Sono consapevole delle ritorsioni a cui mi espongo […] eppure potrò ritenermi soddisfatto nel momento in cui la commistione di leggi segrete, le grazie iniquamente distribuite e gli incontrastabili poteri esecutivi che dominano il mondo che amo verranno a galla, anche solo per un istante».

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

no man is above the law and that includes the president of the United States

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

To be just, a law has to be flexible.

In this way, Harvard Law School gives me a big gift: I worry less about hostile responses. Ultimately, they educate an audience. As the great Flo Kennedy will suggest later when we begin to speak together, "Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, 'I didn't pay him to say that.'

Patriarchy in all its forms is still about controlling reproduction, and thus the bodies of women, which is why invading a female body is still less likely to be punished by law than invading private property.

Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

For as human beings who may be well inclined to each other by nature, yet hold more firmly together when the law cements them, so are stones also, whose forms may already fit together, united far better by these binding forces.

Tunisia's Educational Reform Law, passed in 1991, decreed education to be compulsory for both sexes up until the age of 16.5 Mohamed Charfi, who served as Minister of Education from 1989 to 1994, sought to establish a clear distinction between the study of religion on the one hand and the study of the rights and duties of citizenship—civics—on the other.