"He therefore who recommends that the law should govern seems to recommend that God and reason alone shall govern, but he that would have man govern adds a wild animal also; for appetite is like a wild animal, and passion warps the rule of even the best of men. The law is wisdom without desire." Aristotle, Politics.

"What is left, without God's direction, is simply a conflict of forces, in which the party that wins rules the roost." Edmund Wilson, [on] Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

[If law is merely] ". . . legal precepts which are actually recognized and applied in the tribunals of a given place and time . . . that ends in a skeptical nihilism which is the negation of all law. What is left is not a body of rules of general application, but mere isolated judgments, binding upon the parties only, and losing their quality of law in the very moment they gain it. . . . .If philosophy has not yet been able to penetrate the mystery of substance, it has not yet been able to tell us wherein consists the substance of things. [footnote:] We can say with Comte: 'Tout est relatif, voilà le seul principe absolu.'" --Judge Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law.

"There is nothing in the world which varies so much as customs and laws. Many a thing is abominable here that I commended elsewhere; as in Sparta cleverness in stealing. Marriages with near relations are capital offenses with us, and are in other countries held in honor. . . the murder of infants, the murder of fathers, community of wives, traffic in robberies, license in all sorts of pleasures; nothing in short is so outrageous but it may be allowed by the custom of some nation or other." -- Montaigne, Essays, Bk II Ch. 12 p. 27.

"I gather from his other works that he adopts the principle of Hobbes, that justice is founded in contract solely, and does not result from the construction of man. I believe on the contrary, that it is instinct, and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing or hearing; as a wise Creator must have seen to be necessary in an animal destined to live in society. . . the non-existence of justice is not to be inferrred from the fact that the same act is considered virtuous and right in one society, which is held vicious and wrong in another . . . " Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, Oct 14, 1816

"It is useful, in framing laws, not only to study the past history of one's own country, in order to understand which constitution is desirable for it now, but also to have a knowledge of the constitutions of other nations, and so to learn for what kinds of nation the various kinds of constitution are suited. From this we can see that the books of travel are useful aids to legislation, since from these we may learn the laws and customs of different races. The political speaker will also find the researches of historians useful. But all this is the business of political science and not of rhetoric." Aristotle, Rhetoric

"English colonists on the Atlantic seaboard introduced common law to the American continent, while French colonial activity brought in laws originally derived from Roman law. . . The common law is not a written code . . the principles of common law have always eluded complete embodiment in any code or collection of writings. Judicial decisions recorded on the plea rolls in common law courts, declaratory statutes, and learned treatises on the common law may all express the principles of the common law, but these writings never comprise its totality. . . . The principle that no man ought to be illegally deprived of his liberty may be expressed in a judicial decision, in a parliamentary statute, or in a learned treatise on the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Writings will merely reveal the principle. The principle can exist, without a writing, in the form of a generally accepted tradition." Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law

"The doctrine of the supremacy of law implies that all agencies of government must act upon established principles; even the highest bodies and officials are not permitted to act upon arbitrary will or caprice. . . [F]or several centuries every family fortune in England has been protected and regulated by intricate rules of common law. At any period between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, a complete overthrow of the common-law rules and the courts administering them would have effected every property owner." Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law

Qualities necessary to preservation of free government-- That no free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles; and by the recognition by all citizens that they have duties as well as rights, and that such rights cannot be enjoyed save in a society where law is respected and due process is observed. --Section Fifteen of Article I of the Virginia Constitution

[Justice Felix Frankfurter was sitting in the audience for Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons with his friend, Sir Harold Beale, Australian Ambassador to the United States. In the play Sir Thomas More's daughter Alice and his son-in-law Roper are urging More, who is England's Lord Chancellor, all-powerful head of the judiciary, to arrest the treacherous man who they know will ultimately betray More and send him to the scaffold:]

"Alice
While you talk, he's gone!

Sir Thomas More
And go he should if he was the Devil himself until he broke the law!

Roper
So now you'd give the Devil benefit of the law?

More
Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper
I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More
Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--d'you think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

At the end of this passage Justice Frankfurter could not contain himself. 'That's the point!' he kept whispering to us in the dark, 'That's it, that it!'" --Sir Harold Beale, eulogy for Frankfurter reprinted as an essay called 'A Man for All Seasons'

"I do take law seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling." --Justice Felix Frankfurter

"The fundamental article of my political creed is, that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical counsel, an oligarchical junto and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary cruel bloody and in every respect diabolical. . . . Will you be so good as to recollect the proposition I formerly made you in private and try if you can work it into some good to save our union? It was that any proposition might be negatived by the representatives of a majority of the people in America, or of a majority of the colonies of America. The former secures the larger, the latter the smaller colonies." Jefferson letters to John Adams.

[Commodore Vanderbilt's testimony before the New York legislature]; 'Did you not know that the law provides a remedy for all wrongs?' [Vanderbilt:] The law, as I view it, goes too slow for me when I have the remedy in my own hands.' --Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children

". . . In prison, if I were asked the single most consistent cause of mental derangement in prisoners, I can tell you with utmost confidence: injustice." Jack Henry Abbott, In The Belly Of The Beast

[Jack Scroggins, a slave, reported to the Union where some Confederate ammunition was hidden. The Union officer, in accord with the Fugitive Slave Law, returned him to his owner. The Virginia slaveowner tied Scroggins to a tree and took turns with his overseer whipping him, whipping him from twelve o'clock at night until 3am. "[H]e had on a new cotton shirt when they began to whip him, and when they were done there was nothing left of it but the collar-band and the wristbands." [Scroggins was whipped to death.] --George E. Stephens [African American Civil War soldier]

 "[On why the Army had to execute Private Slovik:] "I remembered a night in the summer of 1940 when I sat in a tent in Louisiana with a pensive [General] George S. Patton, Jr. . . . 'Yes by God, I am worried,' the General said. 'I'm worried because I'm not sure our country can field a fighting army in this stage in our history. We've pampered and confused our youth. We've talked too much about rights and not enough about duties . . . .' This is not to deny the United States the right to inconvenience Slovik, even to kill him . . . . It is only to remember that the United States was created and has been sustained by men who honestly feared it, for the purpose of making men free to be different, free to be weak, free to be perverse, free to be cussed, free to resent and challenge community demands on their private lives." William Bradford Huie, The Execution of Private Slovik

After all, there is no position so absurd that you cannot get a great many people to assume it. Lord Maugham, a former Lord Chancellor (where do they find them?) was convinced that the decline of the Roman Empire was the result of too frequent bathing. Justinian knew there was a causal link between buggery and earthhquakes, while our grandparents, as Professor Steven Marcus recently reminded us, believed that masturbation caused insanity." Gore Vidal

"I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds which can connect the rulers and the people together . . . without which, every government degenerates into tyranny. If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves . . . I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit with actuates the people of America-- a spirit which nourishes freedom, and is in turn nourished by it. . . If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty. Publius (Madison or Hamilton), Federalist No. 57.

'The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because that power was placed in their hands by the Constitution. But the Executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it; because that power has been confided to him by the Constitution. That instrument meant that its co-ordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch. . . . While we deny that Congress have a right to control freedom of the press, we have ever asserted the right of states, and their exclusive right, to do so." Jefferson letter to Abigail Adams, Sept. 11, 1804.

"To set the judicial power above that of the legislature. . . would be subversive of all government." Blackstone, Commentaries

[When Wales was still a separate sovereignty] "clashes of jurisdiction arose [and] English judges (especially the justiciar of Chester) made it clear they would hear cases in the royal courts referred to them from plaintiffs adversely judged under Welsh law and if necessary overrule them, thus further reducing the Prince of Wales' dignity and power." Simon Shama, A History of Britain 3500B.C--1603A.D

"I own I should prefer a qualitative formula, hard, conventional, difficult to evade. If it could become sacred by the incrustations of time and precedent it might be made to serve just a little to withhold the torrents of passion to which I suspect democracies will be found more subject than for example the Whig autocracy of the 18th Century. . . Besides, their Ineffabilities, the Nine Elder Statesmen have not shown themselves wholly immune from the herd instinct." Judge Learned Hand letter to Zechariah Chafee, Jr., Jan 2, 1921.

"For Holmes, this duty (of deciding between often equally persuasive and irreconcilable positions) was tempered by another fundamental fact: 'that . . . all questions are ultimately questions of degree'--a view that conservatives such as Justice McKenna, he thought, failed to recognize . . . But it was right for a judge who saw himself upholding the concept of judicial review-performing the role of 'oracle in a world of fragmentation and disbelief.' As he wrote to Frankfurter at he end of the decade: 'I see no reason for expecting to touch bottom. I accept my limitations and bow my head.' [From the introductory essay to:] Holmes and Frankfurter-Their Correspondence,' Mennel & Compston, eds.

"While I was in practice at the bar, I tried to find the pertinent authority, and fit it close to the case at hand. I was not much concerned whether it was right if I was sure it was pertinent, and I had a blind faith which persisted in the face of reverses and discouragements, that if its pertinence was established, if it fitted well and truly, the courts would follow it inexorably to the limit of its logic. I learned by sad experience that they failed, now and again, to come out where I expected." Benjamin Cardozo, On the Growth of the Law

"I say Law in Books is merely Syballine leaves of prophecy as to when the public force will be brought to bear on you through the courts. And a statement of rights is merely part of these prophecies-the talk about rights is what I believe the philosophers call a hypostasis of the prophecy." Holmes letter to Frankfurter Nov. 4, 1915. [nb see American Banana co. v United Fruit Co., 213 U.S. 347, 356-57 (1909)(holding United Fruit's suborning Costa Rican government was outside the Sherman Act because 'law is a statement of the circumstances in which the public force will be brought to bear upon men through the courts. But the word commonly is confined to such prophecies or threats when addressed to persons living within the power of the courts.'); see also Kawananakoa v. Polybank, 205 U.S. 349, 353 (107) Holmes, J. for a unanimous court, holding: "Hawaii as a sovereign is exempt from a suit involving Hawaiin land, "not because of any formal conception or obsolete theory, but on the logical and practical ground that there can be no legal right as against the authority that makes the right on which the law depends.") ]

"The wise and good alone are fit to be magistrates, judges or orators, whereas among the bad there is not one so qualified. . . . [T]he wise are infallible, not being liable to error. They are also without offense; for they do no hurt to others or to themselves. At the same time they are not pitiful and make no allowance for anyone; they never relax the penalties fixed by the laws, since indulgence and pity and even equitable considerations are marks of a weak mind, which affects kindness in place of chastising."--Diogenes Laertius, Zeno

"Some of the bitterest controversies of the law preserve their ancient feud today. Platonist and Aristotelian flock to the standards of their leaders. . . . No one of us has a vision at once so keen and so broad as to penetrate these unsounded depths and gather in its sweep this enveloping horizon. We can only cling for the most part to the accumulated experience of the past, and to the maxims and principles and rules and standards in which that experience is embodied. . . . Some compromise is inevitable between liberty and license, between uniformity and diversity. [Law needs] . . . a philosophy that will mediate between the conflicting claims of stability and progress, and supply a principle of growth. . . [r]est and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive. The law, like human kind, if life is to continue, must find some path of compromise. . . . If some of the applications of philosophy to law may not incite to emulation, the fault has been, not in supposing that philosophy is a helpful guide, but in the conception of philosophy as alien to experience and life. One must select ones guide with care, even though the candidates for employment are decked in the regalia of the schools." " --Judge Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law. 

"In every generation both lawyers and laymen seem to have been drawn toward two desirable but widely separated and contradictory goals. The first of the is the goal of permanence, stability, certainty in legal doctrines. The second is the goal of flexibility or adaptability, permitting adjustment of the law to social necessities." Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law

"No absolutist is so intransigent as to assert that there can be literal adherence to a standard of equality or liberty. Some compromise is inevitable between liberty and license, between uniformity and diversity." Benjamin Cardozo, On the Growth of the Law.

"I discovered in Scotland that in 1648 the General Assembly of the Kirk, in adopting the larger catechism, addressed itself, in Question 145, to the sins included in the Ninth Commandment. One of them is "speaking the truth unseasonably." You will recognize this as a sin I have been committing all my life." Robert M. Hutchins, letter to Thorton Wilder.

"Legal philosophers have disputed for more than two thousand years about what law means. Some have thought that it includes the customs or usages which are generally current in a society; others have held that it should be limited to those rules which will be enforced by government. The question is perhaps one of words, but as I am speaking of civilized modern society, it will be more convenient to use the word in the second sense. Law does not mean whatever people usually do, or even what they think to be right. Certainly it does not mean what only the most enlightened individuals usually do or think right. It is the conduct which the government, whether it is a king, or a popular assembly, will compel individuals to conform to, or to which it will provide forcible means to secure conformity." Judge Learned Hand

"I like to think that the work of a judge is an art . . . After all, why isn't it in the nature of an art? It is a bit of craftsmanship, isn't it? It is what a poet does, it is what a sculptor does. He has some vague purposes and he has an indefinite number of what you might call frames of preference among which he must choose; for choose he has to, and he does." Judge Learned Hand

--W.H. Auden

"Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowldge; ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered." Luke 11:52.

"The lawyer's tense and bitter shrewdness" [fosters a soul that is ]"narrow and crooked." Plato, Theatatus.

"A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client." [attributed to] Abraham Lincoln

" One heard Burke saying that the law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. One heard in Thackery of a lawyer bending all the powers of a great mind to a mean profession. One saw that artists and poets shrank from it as from an alien world. One doubted oneself how it could be worthy of the interest of an intelligent mind. And yet, one said to oneself, law is human-it is a part of man, and of one world with all the rest. . . .If a man has the soul of Sancho Panza, the world to him will be Sancho Panza'a world; but if he has the soul of an idealist, he will make I do not say find his world ideal. Of course the law is not the place for the artist or the poet. The law is the calling of thinkers." -Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

"This book is about a crisis in the American legal profession. Its message is that the profession now stands in danger of losing its soul . . . . This crisis is, in essence, a crisis of morale. It is the product of growing doubts about the capacity of a lawyer's life to offer fulfillment to the person who takes it up. Disguised by the material well-being of lawyers, yet is a spiritual crisis that strikes at the heart of their professional pride. . . . Earlier generations of American lawyers conceived their goal to be the attainment of a wisdom that lies beyond technique-- a wisdom about human beings and their tangled affairs that anyone who wishes to provide real deliberative counsel must possess. . . To those who shared this view it seemed obvious that a lawyer's life could be deeply fulfilling. . . But in the last generation this ideal has collapsed, and with it the professional self-confidence it once sustained. . . I call it the ideal of the lawyer-statesman. . . .I have reached a gloomy conclusion. I do not think the ideal of the lawyer-statesman can be revived, at least at the institutional level . . . Individuals, perhaps, may find a way to honor this ideal in their own careers. But increasingly I fear, they will be able to do so only by openly rejecting the announced values of their profession and searching out the cracks and crevices in which a person devoted to the ideal of the lawyer-statesman may still make a living in the law." -- Anthony T. Kronman, The Lost Lawyer.

"[Hyperlink lawsuits] have proven legally complex, involving claims of false advertising, misappropriation, fair use and the hyperlink's friend, the First Amendment. They have also proven morally complex, raising questions of originality, and of whether pointing to another's work can be a work in itself."--Jenny Lyn Bader, "Forget Footnotes: Hyperlink," in New York Times, Sunday July 16 2000 [web version].

"If you went into a forty-something partner's office and saw a picture of him with hair down to his shoulders, you were in trouble. You would be dealing with someone whose cynicism was boundless: a shark in pinstripes, a creature to whom decency was just an old-fashioned superstition favored by the old, the foolish, and the weak. . . As young longhairs they had seen the world of Men In Suits as -- at best -- a bloody, amoral Darwinian jungle. When, after their period of Aquarian innocence they decided finally to embrace "the system", it wasn't the real system as experienced by their parents, but the radical caricature. As a result it never occurred to them to operate on anything but a basis of ruthless self-interest." Jonathan Foreman, My Life As A Lawyer

"The government's severity boosts the price of drugs, makes the game more desperate for addicts as well as pushers, and encourages crime which in turn increases the payroll of the narcotics bureau. This lunatic state of affairs could only exist in a society still obsessed by the idea that the punishing of sin is the responsibility of the state. Gore Vidal

"Senators often don't know what they are voting on. That's a lousy way to run a lemonade stand, much less our national legislative process. . . Bills are passed to wildly that they often contain unprinted amendments. This means Congress is passing legislation it has never read!" --Senator Barry Goldwater.

"The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action, but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"--Publius (Madison), Federalist No. 62.

--Lord Bowen