Jurists

"I think there should be no occasion on which it is absolutely, as a point or rule of law, impossible for a man to redeem his character."

"Persecution is a very easy form of virtue."

"A difficult form of virtue is to try in your own life to obey what you believe to be God's will."

"We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be."

"I must lay down the law as I understand it, and as I read it in books of authority."

"Law grows, and though the principles of law remain unchanged, yet (and it is one of the advantages of the common law) their application is to be changed with the changing circumstances of the times. Some persons may call this retrogression, I call it progression of human opinion."

"It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one."

"The moment juries or judges go beyond their functions, and take upon themselves to lay down the law or find the facts, not according to the law as it is, but according to the law as they think it ought to be, then the certainty of the law is at an end; there is nothing to rely upon; we are left to the infinite variety and uncertainty of human opinion; to caprice which may at any moment influence the best of us, to feelings and prejudices, perhaps excellent in themselves, but which may distort or disturb our judgment, and distract our minds from the single simple operation of ascertaining whether the facts proved bring the case within the law as we are bound to take it."

"I am sure from my experience of juries that, in a criminal case especially, they will obey the law as declared by the Judge; they will take the law from the Judge, whether they like it or do not like it, and apply it honestly to the facts before them."

"We must follow the old authorities and precedents in criminal matters."

"It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation."

"A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship."

"We are now Courts of equity, and must decide the thing according to all the rights."

"What is one man's gain is another's loss."

"As long as we have to administer the law we must do so according to the law as it is. We are not here to make the law."

"As a lawyer I am before and above all things for the supremacy of law."

"It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows."

"I was brought up under a system in which discretion when given was practically absolute. It was the unbroken tradition of Westminster Hall. I believe that system worked justice and saved expense. I hope I may be forgiven if, with what energy remains to me, I strive after many years' experience and drawing near the close of my judicial career, to preserve this unfettered discretion which in my opinion, was given me by Parliament, and which I have never, at least intentionally abused."

"We have to administer the law whether we like it or no."

"However much men may honestly endeavour to limit the exercise of their discretion by definite rule, there must always be room for idiosyncracy; and idiosyncracy, as the word expresses, varies with the man. But there is, besides this, that of which every student of legal history must be aware, the leaning of the Courts for a certain time in a particular direction, balanced at least, if not reversed, by the leaning of the Courts for a certain time in a direction opposite. The current of legal decision runs often to a point which is felt to be beyond the bounds of sound and sane control, and there is danger sometimes that the retrocession of the current should become itself extreme."

"It is no longer true in the sense in which it was true when these dicta were uttered, that " Christianity is part of the law of the land." Nonconformists and Jews were then under penal laws, and were hardly allowed civil rights. But now, so far as I know the law, a Jew might be Lord Chancellor. Certainly he might be Master of the Rolls, and the great Judge whose loss we have all had to deplore2 might have had to try such a case, and if the view of the law supposed be correct, he would have had to tell the jury, perhaps partly composed of Jews, that it was blasphemy to deny that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, which he himself did deny, and which Parliament has allowed him to deny, and which it was part of " the law of the land " that he might, deny."

"I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views on those most sacred things, that he should be branded as apparently criminal because he differed from the majority of mankind in his religious views or convictions on the subject of religion. If that were so, we should get into ages and times which, thank God, we do not live in, when people were put to death for opinions and beliefs which now almost all of us believe to be true."

"To me the entire uselessness of such rules^as practical guides lies in the inherent vagueness of the word "reasonable," the absolute impossibility of finding a definite standard, to be expressed in language, for the fairness and the reason of mankind, even of Judges. The reason and fairness of one man is manifestly no rule for the reason and fairness of another, and it is an awkward, but as far as I see, an inevitable consequence of the rule, that in every case where the decision of a Judge is overruled, who does or does not stop a case on the ground that there is, or is not, reasonable evidence for reasonable |men, those who overrule him say, by implication, that in the case before them, the Judge who is overruled is out of the pale of reasonable men."

"Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character."

"The popularity of the famous device of the use of lands into England is said to be largely due to the mendicant friars of the then new Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis, who, arriving in this country, in the first half of the thirteenth century, found themselves hampered by their own vows of poverty, no less than by the growing feeling against Mortmain in acquiring the provision of land absolutely necessary for their rapidly developing work."

"Perhaps the most interesting and useful short account of early institutions is to be found in Mr. Edward Jenks's The State and the Nation. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with primitive institutions, patriarchal institutions, and political society. The whole treatment is admirably lucid and balanced."

"With historical as well as legal talent Jenks was a notable researcher into the English Civil War, although his most provocative essay, in the Independent Review 1904-05, challenged the interpretation of Magna Carta. He was elected a fellow of the in 1930 and received many other academic honours."

"Thus, at long last, as a visible emblem of unity was daily growing in the new Palace of Justice then being erected in the Strand, half way between the historic site of Westminster the historic centre of the commercial capital of the world, there began to grow up, in the minds of reformers, the vision of a great and united Supreme Court of Justice, with uniform principles, uniform law, and uniform procedure."

"Perhaps the best testimony to the effectiveness of the reforms of 1852 is the fact, that men of a slightly later generation, familiar with the working of the courts half a century after, find it difficult to believe that such abuses as are plainly described by the legislation of that year, should really have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century."

"It may be that the requirement of a preliminary approval by the Grand Jury, of all accusations of a serious nature, justified the boast that a man was presumed to be innocent until he was 'found' guilty; but that presumption certainly ceased to have practical application, so soon as the Grand Jury had returned a 'true bill'."

"In the year 1871, Mr. Gladstone's Government introduced and passed the first Trade Union Act, by far the most important victory, up to that time achieved by the champions of labour organizations."

"The practice of creating chartered joint-stock companies of a modern type seems to have begun at the commencement of the seventeenth century; and the formation of the East India Company is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, examples. At first, it appears, the 'joint stock' of the company was separately made up for each ship; perhaps for each voyage. But, in the year 1612 the Company made the momentous resolve to have one joint stock for the whole of its affairs, and thus inaugurated a new epoch. The East India Company, or Companies, (for there were two of them), were followed by the Hudson's Bay Company (1670), the existence of which was recognized by statute in 1707, and by the Bank of England and the notorious South Sea Company."

"Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?"

"It was natural that the direct wielders of the royal prerogative, men who sat in the Star Chamber and the Privy Council, who knew the secrets of the State and the necessity for prompt action, should despise the merely declaratory character of a good deal of Common Law process. To them we doubtless owe those four great pillars of Chancery jurisdiction, the injunction, the decree, the sequestration, and the commission of rebellion."

"The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule."

"But we remember that it was just precisely in the reign of Richard II that the Peasants' War, following upon the changes wrought by the visitations of the Great Plague, virtually destroyed serfdom as a personal status."

"The 'Little' or 'Barebones' Parliament, summoned by Oliver Cromwell to meet at Westminster on 4th July, 1653, after the dissolution of the remains of the Long Parliament, may have been an unpractical body, so far as the task of administration in troublous times was concerned. But it seems quite possible that the wealth of contumely and scorn which has been poured upon it was, originally, due quite as much to the fierce anger of vested interests against outspoken criticism, as to any real vagueness or want of practical wisdom in the plans of the House itself."

"The progress of the nation in wealth and refinement, however, naturally brought with it an increase in the number of crimes, as the old definition of offences became inadequate."

"We regard an action of Contract as an action to prevent or compensate for a breach of a promise; an action of Tort as an action to to punish or compensate for a wrong, such as assault or defamation, which has not any necessary connection with a promise."

"First in point of time and interest comes the mortgage debt, i.e. the claim for the return of money lent on the security of some tangible object. Such claims are among the earliest fruits of a commercial civilization, and are nearly always affected the same way, viz. by the deposit or pledge of the security with the creditor, to be redeemed or returned on the payment of the debt."

"Thus the period we are studying is remarkable for achieving, not merely the right of free alienation of land, but also the right of alienation by secret conveyance. The latter achievement we may sometimes regret; but it was, probably, necessary for the complete emancipation of land from its its ancient tribal and feudal bonds."

"But then a daring evasion by a leading conveyancer, known as the Lease and Release, received judicial sanction; and commenced a successful career of more than 200 years. The Lease and Release, attributed to Serjeant Moore, was based on the fact that the Statute of Inrolments did not apply to terms of years."

"The feudal warranty is, doubtless derived from the ancient duty of the feudal lord to protect his liege man 'with fire and sword against all deadly'. It was of the essence of the feudal bond, that the vassal should be under his lord's protection."

"A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history..."

"The fate of the Statute of Uses is one of the most curious in legal history. Its secret and unavowed purpose, of securing the estates of the monasteries for the Crown, it accomplished. Its ostensible purpose, fortified by a wealth of hypocritical justification, it entirely failed to achieve. Not only were devises of lands, after a brief interval, put on a legal footing; but, as is well known, uses of lands as distinguished from legal estates, soon re-appeared in full vigour. Whilst in unforeseen directions, that statute worked havoc in the medieval system of conveyancing; and gradually modernized it out of existence."

"Whatever else the Norman Conquest may or may not have done, it made the old haphazard state of legal affairs forever impossible."

"It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point."

"It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day."

"What is technically called the 'fungibility' of money, is its chief value as an article of commerce; and this fact could not long remain recognized, even by such a conservative class as legal officials."

"The common law of chattels, that is to say, the law ultimately adopted by the King's courts for the regulation of disputes about the ownership and possession of goods, was, to be a substantial extent, a by-product of that new procedure which had been mainly introduced to perfect the feudal scheme of land law."