Law

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment."

"I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one."

"When law can do no right, Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong."

"We have strict statutes and most biting laws."

"But in these nice sharp quillets of the law, Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw."

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

"We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their perch and not their terror."

"For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked."

"Everyone should be respected by the law, and everyone should respect the law."

"Press not a falling man too far! 'tis virtue: His faults lie open to the laws; let them, Not you, correct him."

"In the corrupted currents of this world, Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice; And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence."

"But is this law? Ay, marry is 't; crowner's quest law."

"Ignorantia juris non excusat. The true meaning of that maxim is that parties cannot excuse themselves from liability from all civil or criminal consequences of their acts by alleging ignorance of the law, but there is no presumption that parties must be taken to know all the legal consequences of their acts, and especially where difficult questions of law, or of the practice of the Court are involved."

"The law does not act vindictively."

"An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed."

"He hath resisted law, And therefore law shall scorn him further trial Than the severity of the public power."

"But, I prithee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? and resolution thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father antic the law?"

"He had no right to take the law into his own hands."

"Every one must be supposed to be cognizant of a public law."

"Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law."

""If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, "the law is a ass, a idiot." If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience"."

"I am sorry to think, that Englishmen should seem to excuse themselves by ignorance of the law, which all subjects are bound to know, and are born to have the benefit of."

"Every man (who is of sufficient understanding to be responsible for his actions) is supposed to be cognizant of the law, as it is the rule by which every subject of the kingdom is to be governed, and therefore it is his business to know it."

"Faith, I have been a truant in the law, And never yet could frame my will to it; And therefore frame the law unto my will."

"To offend, and judge, are distinct offices And of opposed natures."

"Every man must be taken to be cognizant of the law, otherwise there is no saying to what extent the excuse of ignorance may not be Law carried. It would be urged in almost every case."

"A world contrary to God must be kept within bounds by the world’s sword. But true Christians love God and their neighbors as themselves; they commit no evil by the grace of God. It is not necessary to compel them to goodness since they know better what is good than the law imposing authority."

"You who wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a fosset-seller; and then rejourn the controversy of three pence to a second day of audience."

"Necessity knows no law except to conquer."

"I cannot say the law was ever a hard mistress to me: and she did not allow me long to languish in idleness, nor ever suffer me to be without hope. But, of course, I had many idle days, and I was rather fond of note-taking as a very instructive practice, whenever the case was an interesting one, and I found great benefit from it when the facility of taking an accurate and full note rapidly became of the greatest importance in the course of my after life at the Bar and on the Bench."

"It is my province to lay down the law. Every lawyer knows that the law is the result of a great deal of learning."

"Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be."

"To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful."

"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."

"As in elections, the law pretended universal rights, while securing the interests of powerful houses."

"The truth is . . . the old feudal law existing in England … is only being broken down slowly by legislation and decisions of the Court, and . . . still exists to a very great extent."

"No man can come into a British Court of justice to seek the assistance of the law who founds his claim upon a contravention of the British laws."

"Reading, maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; — and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not."

"Laws, like houses, lean on one another."

"There is no positive law: Many things are bad by that, which otherwise were not."

"We must base our laws on faith, not reason."

"The writers of our belief system caution us to make sure that the laws are just — that is, that they are not subverted by those in power for their own interest and permitted to become the means by which the powerful justify their rule and become masters of the many. In such conditions the laws become idols, and we end up worshipping false gods."

"We may appeal to the experience of every sensible lawyer, whether anything can be more hazardous or discouraging than the usual entrance on the study of the law."

"“Legal documents . . . are written to be preserved and consulted . . . . The form and syntax of a legal document, whether from the twelfth century or the twentieth, reflect the form and syntax of other written documents” (Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 9). Footnote 61, p.12"

"Law memorializes not just in its archival activities, but in acts that give particular meanings to our past. In every legal act there is an invitation to remember; in the testimony of the witnesses at the trial, in the instructions a judge gives to a jury, in particular interpretive theories, and in the monumental buildings that house our courts as well as our prisons, there is an insistent call to remember."

"For my part, I never knew a social evil to be removed by force of law...The prevention of that social evil must commence in the nursery. If you will bring up woman as you ought to bring up men—not as you do bring up men—acknowledging her right to live the same as men, giving her the same advantages and the same rights that men have, there will be no need to enact laws against a "social evil…I say to the Legislature that, if you enact laws against social evils, whatever those laws are, let them be alike for man and for woman."

"Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void - is, in fact, not a law."

"In the present moment, as Nora reminds us, [[memory] is “above all archival. It relies on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. . . . Even as traditional memory disappears, we feel obliged assiduously to collect remains, testimonies, documents, images, speeches, any visible signs of what has been.” Museums, monuments, and so on are today, Nora argues, the locations of memory, the sites to which collective memory is attached. If that is indeed the case, one might ask whether law itself might be one of what Nora calls “les lieux de memoire.” Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of ur society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a aprticular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"The essays in “History, Memory and the Law” address this subject, each in its own distinctive voice. They present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices rather than grand theories. In so doing they address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites. Here we attend to what Lucie White has labeled both the “epic” style of remembering the past, the “grand, monumental, Manichean style . . . that splits the world, morally, along temporal lines,” as well as to what she calls the “tragic” style of remembering. This style, White claims, “teases out the multiple, tangled, always partial threads that comprise the space where ‘civility’ has been enacted and resisted and reshaped.” This kind of remembering spurns “grand gestures.” It remembers in “grounded, gradual ways.” It makes the accomplishments of the past more hard fought, more tentative, more elusive, and more deeply intertwined with the moral horrors to which it insists we attend. The essays in this book also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshaling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process. Among the questions that they address are, How are the histories and memories created by law different by virtue of the site of their creation? Through what representational practices are the seeming continuities between past and present that are necessary to legitimize legal decisions constructed and preserved? Whose histories and memories “count” in law? What does history do to and for, law, and what does law do to history? Under what conditions do legal institutions, such as courts or prisons, becomes sites of memory?"

"Necessity creates the law, — it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases is likewise legal."