The best use of good laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.

The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don't break any.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform, and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

The man for whom law exists-the man of forms, the conservative-is a tame man.

The lawyers truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Rigorous law is often rigorous injustice.

Laws are like spiders webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.

Wrong must not win by technicalities.

No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

Every new time will give its law.

There's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.

People say law but they mean wealth.