“The law isn t merciful.”
“Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.”
“I was willing to do it. was determined to do it. By the end of the day, that had become my reaction to all of the signs of hard things ahead - a new purposefulness, hardy resolve. Everything I d encountered so far - the law, my classmates, the great piece of discovery - had left me in deep thrall and I was bent on making sure that continued. I would have the best of it, I decided, whatever the obstacles.”
“Once, when a government agent arrived at her home with a ream of paper that documented the case against her, she asked if that law was more powerful than natural law. He told her that, yes, it was a powerful law, the law of the federal government. Then, she said, it should be more powerful that this, and she threw it into her woodstove.”
“Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.”
“There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to go back eighteen rows, and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can t resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, Silence, it s my will.”
“God is Love but He also is the Lawgiver”
“Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for lawbreaking.”
“The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man s contribution could be in proportion to his means.”
“We are no longer under the Law , but rather the Grace of God in Christ. ~R. Alan Woods [2013]”
“The laws of men are not infallible.”
“Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
“When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master.”
“All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be Girl A - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn t. It was about me. I am Girl A.”
“In court the next morning I sat at a table in the judge’s chambers. On the other side of the table, close enough for me to reach across and touch him, sat Ted Bundy. He’s adorable, I thought, surprised at my first impression, because I’d pictured him in my mind as brooding, dark, intense disdain (p. 83). (Loftus testified as a defense expert for Ted Bundy in 1976, Bundy was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping)”
“In front of the law there is a doorkeeper. A man from the countryside comes up to the door and asks for entry. But the doorkeeper says he can t let him in to the law right now. The man thinks about this, and then he asks if he ll be able to go in later on. That s possible, says the doorkeeper, but not now . The gateway to the law is open as it always is, and the doorkeeper has stepped to one side, so the man bends over to try and see in. When the doorkeeper notices this he laughs and says, If you re tempted give it a try, try and go in even though I say you can t. Careful though: I m powerful. And I m only the lowliest of all the doormen. But there’s a doorkeeper for each of the rooms and each of them is more powerful than the last. It s more than I can stand just to look at the third one.”
“We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.”