“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.”
“A great believer in precedent, Della Street said. I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he d faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that s what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.”
“By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can t think. The comedy of law s sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.”
“The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it.”
“Le pays latins, comme les pays d Orient, oppriment la femme par le rigueur des moeurs encore plus que par celle des lois.”
“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.”
“Every law requires a response”
“But truth doesn t count / in law, only proof.”
“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”
“If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.”
“He that discovers and defines law is law abiding”