Law

"Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare The feet of justice in the toils of law, Stand ready to oppress the weaker still, And right or wrong will vindicate for gold, Sneering at public virtue, which beneath Their pitiless tread lies torn and trampled where Honor sits smiling at the sale of truth."

"Cade: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer; all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass; and when I am king, as king I will be, there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord. Dick: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Cade: Nay, that I mean to do."

"What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box."

"About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."

"A common and not necessarily apocryphal example portrays a solo practitioner starved for business in a small town. A second lawyer then arrives, and they both prosper."

"Let's ask ourselves: Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million new lawsuits coursing through the system annually? Is it right that people with disputes come up against staggering expense and delay?"

"That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers…. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen."

"Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation."

"I pleaded your cause, Sextus, having agreed to do so for two thousand sesterces How is it that you have sent me only a thousand? "You said nothing," you tell me, "and this cause was lost through you." You ought to give me so much the more, Sextus, as I had to blush for you."

"The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”"

"[F]or a long time I used to think that anal sex was how lawyers were conceived."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"The goddess Peri became so jealous that she laid a curse on my mother, who turned into a lawyer."

"Lawyers earn their bread in the sweat of their browbeating."

"I suspect that there are just two sorts of lawyers: those who spend their efforts making life easy for other people—and parasites."

"Courage remains as important in the legal profession today as it was then. Throughout our history lawyers who have made the greatest mark on this country haven't done so because they were smarter or were born into better families or held more important positions; it was because they were willing to stand firm for justice in the face of immense pressure and often at grave personal costs."

"Courage has been essential to the rule of law in this country from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence itself was, at heart, a complaint that the king had denied colonists the rule of law. As justification for their rebellion, colonists cited the fact that the king had withheld assent to duly enacted legislation, refused trial by jury, and prevented colonists from playing a significant role in their own governance. About half of the fifty-six colonists who signed the Declaration were lawyers. They quite literally put their lives on the line to secure a representative government and one of just laws: By signing the declaration, they became marked men who faced certain death if their cause failed."

"It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement."

"The function of the lawyer is to preserve a sceptical relativism in a society hell-bent for absolutes. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law and due process will be meticulously observed."

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

"Professionals, too, proved exceptionally susceptible to Hitler's appeal. Lawyers and doctors were substantially over-represented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To fat middle-aged lawyers, he was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome. 'Right down to the last, deepest fibre in myself, I belong to the Führer and his wonderful movement,' wrote the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank in his diary after a concert he had attended with Hitler on February 10, 1937. 'We are in truth God's tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in God's name against Jews and their Bolshevism. God protect us!' Such thoughts helped him and many other lawyers to come to terms with the systematic illegality that characterized the regime from the very outset: the arrests without trial (26,000 people were already in 'protective custody' as early as July 1933), the summary executions (beginning with the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when between eighty-five and two hundred people, including the over-mighty leaders of the SA, were murdered in cold blood) and, of course, the escalating discrimination against racial and social minorities."

"Next, bring some lawyers to thy bar, By innuendo they might all stand there; There let them expiate that guilt, And pay for all that blood their tongues have spilt. These are the mountebanks of state, Who by the sleight of tongues can crimes create, And dress up trifles in the robes of fate, The mastiffs of a Government, To worry and run down the innocent."

"He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping."

"America is the paradise of lawyers."

"It may be that the jury would incline to regard a practising lawyer as a man of probity whose word was prima facie worthy of belief. But the belief of lawyers in their own probity is not universally shared, and there are those who believe them to be capable of almost any chicanery or sharp practice."

"LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law."

"She had once looked up the term ‘lawyer’ and found it was someone who helped you fight laws."

"Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."

"Discussion. In this case, the Court abandoned the strict common law rules of appropriation. The viewer of the ad could clearly see that it was an attempt to convey Plaintiff on the set of Wheel of Fortune. Defendant hoped to profit from Plaintiff’s fame without paying her for it. Because Plaintiff did not consent to such appropriation, Defendant is liable."

"Dissent. (J. Kozinski) Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as under protecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture."

"Defendant used a robot with mechanical features and not, for example, a manikin molded to Plaintiff’s precise features. The robot at issue was not Plaintiff’s “likeness” within the meaning of section 3344."

"When you shut down neurons to prevent them from transmitting signals, we call that "brain damage." Copyright is brain damage. It's brain damage in the great mind, and it's brain damage in the individual mind."

"In ten years I think the [copyright] laws are going to be worse and I also think they are going to be less relevant. I mean, already the difference between the laws and people's behaviour, It's like they're different planets. I'm not hopeful for the laws changing. A lot of other people are, so maybe we will have meaningful copyright reform. I doubt it. I don't think it matters. I think the tools are available for people to create and share culture and they're going to do that and they might be doing it illegally and at a certain point it's going to be more than the system can handle. I will say that if the power structure as it exists wants to continue they're going to have to reform because it's not sustainable. Copyright law as it is, it's just completely out of touch with human behaviour."

"Mimi: Silencing you because I don’t like what you say is censorship. Silencing you because I can make more money that way is copyright. They’re totally different! Eunice: The profit motive makes it OK."

"The corporations that hold these copyrights are media companies that also control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old stuff competing with the media stream that they control now."

"If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence"

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

"I was in the pub last night, and a guy asked me for a light for his cigarette. I suddenly realised that there was a demand here and money to be made, and so I agreed to light his cigarette for 10 pence, but I didn't actually give him a light, I sold him a license to burn his cigarette. My fire-license restricted him from giving the light to anybody else, after all, that fire was my property. He was drunk, and dismissing me as a loony, but accepted my fire (and by implication the licence which governed its use) anyway. Of course in a matter of minutes I noticed a friend of his asking him for a light and to my outrage he gave his cigarette to his friend and pirated my fire! I was furious, I started to make my way over to that side of the bar but to my added horror his friend then started to light other people's cigarettes left, right, and centre! Before long that whole side of the bar was enjoying MY fire without paying me anything. Enraged I went from person to person grabbing their cigarettes from their hands, throwing them to the ground, and stamping on them. Strangely the door staff exhibited no respect for my property rights as they threw me out the door."

"Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot [...] Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."

"Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly [...] It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

"Copyright law cases typically involve multifactorial analyses and lots of nuance. I would not assume that a commercial book publisher's use of "Seinfeld" quotes necessarily tells us anything about a non-commercial reference's use of quotations. Many people believe that copyright jurisprudence gives clear and obvious guidance about how one should use copyrighted materials in future cases. My experience has been, however, that this belief is mistaken."

"Things have been going in the wrong direction -- more surveillance, more control of everything we do on the net and also stricter copyright laws -- that's the wrong course for Europe. We want to set a new one."

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

"Well, then, the moment there is a patent case one can see it before the case is opened, or called in the list. How can we see it? We can see it by a pile of books as high as this invariably... Now, what is the result of all this? Why that a man had better have his patent infringed, or have anything happen to him in this world, short of losing all his family by influenza, than have a dispute about a patent. His patent is swallowed up, and he is ruined. Whose fault is it? It is really not the fault of the law; it is the fault of the mode of conducting the law in a patent case. This is what causes all this mischief."

"A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and can't travel any way but sideways and backwards."

"The good patent gives the world something it did not truly have before, whereas the bad patent has the effect of trying to take away from the world something which it effectively already had."

"There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

"Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of production... Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly."

"If one does not know whether a system “as a whole” (in contrast to certain features of it) is good or bad, the safest “policy conclusion” is to “muddle through” – either with it, if one has long lived with it, or without it, if one has lived without it... If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it. This last statement refers to a country such as the United States of America – not to a small country and not a predominantly nonindustrial country, where a different weight of argument might well suggest another conclusion..."

"Before then [the adoption of the United States Constitution], any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."