"We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are: citizens and employees and doctors and spouses and people who own things. It is sword, shield, and menace: we insist on our wage, or refuse to pay our rent, or are forced to forfeit penalties, or are closed up in jail, all in the name of what our abstract and ethereal sovereign, the law, has decreed. And we argue about what it has decreed, even when the books that are supposed to record its commands and directions are silent; we act then as if law had muttered its doom, too low to be heard distinctly. We are subjects of law's empire, liegemen to its methods and ideals, bound in spirit while we debate what we must therefore do."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesLawyers from New York (state)Jews from the United StatesPeople from Rhode Island
Original Language: English
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Sources
Law's Empire (1986), Preface
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Dworkin
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Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin (11 December 1931 - 14 February 2013) was an American legal philosopher.
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