LAW WISDOM

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.(Adams)

The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth. (Dershowitz)

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." (U.S. Grant)

In law it is a good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you cannot. (Lincoln)

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it. (Macklin)

Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice. (McIlvanney)

Law students are trained in the case method, and to the lawyer everything in life looks like a case. (Packard)

Law is experience developed by reason and applied continually to further experience. (R. Pound)

If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order. (Szasz)

The law is like the killy-loo bird, a creature that insisted on flying backward because it didn't care where it was going but was mightily interested in where it had been. (Rodell)

". . . in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction. . ." "If the law supposes that, 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." (Mr. Bumble)

The Law is not Justice. The definition of Justice varies by the time, place, situation and culture. The Law should be a best effort process that is most likely to result in Justice based on experience, the known past and the foreseeable future. (Zacharia)

Authority is a transient honor lent by consensus to those deemed worthy. It is a volatile privilege the burden of which is continual revalidation. (Zacharia)