Top 100 Legal Law Quotes
#1. Cross-examination is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth ... Cross-examination, not trial by jury, is the great and permanent contribution of the Anglo-American system of law to improved methods of trial-procedure.
John Henry Wigmore
#2. I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!
William Gaddis
#3. Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.
Thurgood Marshall
#4. I condemn polygamy, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#5. When the Commander-in-Chief of a nation finds it necessary to order employees of the government or agencies of the government to do things that would technically break the law, he has to be able to declare it legal for them to do that.
Ronald Reagan
#7. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
John Stuart Mill
#8. Harming one's unalienable rights in order to serve justice is injustice.
J.S.B. Morse
#9. In my legal practice, I have seen certain Federal judges controlled or influenced by large corporations ... , by large law firms ... on more than one occasion(, and) ... by special interests ... (some) ought to be thrown right off the bench because they are breaking every code of conduct ...
Orrin Hatch
#10. I have never stuck up for any criminal. I have merely asked for the orderly administration of an impartial justice ... Due legal process is my own safeguard against being convicted unjustly. To my mind, that's government. That's law and order.
Erle Stanley Gardner
#11. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#12. Ascribing racial animus to people who are trying to safeguard democratic integrity is a crude yet effective political tactic that obscures the truth. But there's something even worse than name-calling: legal interference from Washington with valid laws.
Edwin Meese
#13. I think it's pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system, without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country.
Mark Fuhrman
#14. It is essential to institute a legal framework that would ensure justice and improve the quality of life in Burma immediately, because the greatest suffering among the people at the moment is caused by lack of justice and lack of the rule of law.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#15. And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.
George Carlin
#17. The more laws that are created, the closer we get to lawlessness.
J.S.B. Morse
#18. Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.
Alexander Herzen
#19. As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]
Sarah Bakewell
#20. My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that.
Questlove
#21. Palestine is occupied land, and under international law, the Palestinians have the legal right to resist this occupation by any and all means. This may make busses, restaurants, discos-where Israeli military congregate, lawful targets.
Enver Masud
#22. The law has no compassion. And justice is administered without compassion.
Christopher Darden
#23. By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage.
William Blackstone
#24. Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?
Frank Herbert
#25. The Patriot Act removed major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security.
Jon Porter
#26. The legal profession is notorious for complicating the simples of things.
Sarah M. Eden
#27. I don't even talk about whether or not racial profiling is legal. I just don't think racial profiling is a particularly good law enforcement tool.
Eric Holder
#28. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
Howard Zinn
#29. It is impossible to tell where the law stops and justice begins.
Arthur Baer
#30. Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction.
Lysander Spooner
#31. I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.
Jeffrey Rasley
#32. In terms of the legal matter of creating a contract between two people that's called marriage, and allowing them to live together with the protection of law, it seems to me is the way we should be moving in this country.
Colin Powell
#33. My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says there was any violation of law whatsoever.
Al Gore
#34. The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future's shape, look to the past.
John Pipkin
#35. It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.
Edward Jenks
#36. Integrity is the key to understanding legal practice. Law's empire is defined by attitude, not territory or power or process.
Ronald Dworkin
#37. To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.
Potter Stewart
#38. So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.
Louis De Bernieres
#39. It is unreasonable to expect a known corrupt law enforcement department to uphold your legal rights.
Steven Magee
#40. I had the good fortune to begin my legal career as a law clerk for a judge who really epitomized open-mindedness and fairness. He read the record in detail in every single case that came before me; he insisted on scrupulously following precedents.
Samuel Alito
#41. Nothing is easy, and, with respect to legal work, that was absolutely true.
Kenneth Eade
#42. To respect law, a man carries mercy with his endeavours. To respect ethics, he moves on wasteful relationships.
Harshit Walia
#43. Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose.
Gilbert Parker
#44. Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information.
Roger Wicker
#45. There is no law, there is only conjecture. The Progressive ethos changes the law's meaning according to fad and fashion.
A.E. Samaan
#47. I can't see that it's wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.
John F. Kennedy
#48. You can rob from the poor to give to the rich. It's legal.
Marty Rubin
#49. As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
Alan Greenspan
#50. For me, taking the sort of dry principles of the law and bringing them into contact with human beings ... it's like you jump into hyperspace. And everything that's dull about the books and the theory becomes provocative.
Michael Ponsor
#51. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations.
J. William Fulbright
#52. In high school, I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.
Constance Baker Motley
#53. There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.
Malcolm Gladwell
#54. We have to get control of our borders. You can only do that if you make companies obey the law and not hire undocumented or illegals. They can only do that is if they have a Social Security Card that has biometrics so they know whether the person is legal or not.
Michael Bloomberg
#55. - Do not do to another that which you would abhor being done to you; that is the law. All the rest is legal commentary.
Paulo Coelho
#56. There may be a legal obligation to obey, but there will be no moral obligation to obey. When it comes to history, it will be the people who broke the law for freedom who will be remembered and honoured.
Tony Benn
#57. It is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall - which was, and is, before all a Law College - and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.
Edward Carpenter
#58. The legal relations between the individual and the community which arise out of the production and distribution of property, comprise by far the greater, and more important, part of the law; subtract these and very little content would be left.
Learned Hand
#59. Being a justice. If you love law the way I do ... you're given the job of a lifetime ... you're permitted to address the most important legal questions of the country, and sometimes the world. And in doing so, you make a difference in people's lives.
Sonia Sotomayor
#60. I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.
Camille Paglia
#61. Our goal is not to douse the recession with money, which would be useless, as both you and I know. Our goal is to liberate the business initiative, to lower administrative and law enforcement pressure and to make legal protection truly effective
Dmitry Medvedev
#62. We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it's legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.
Dianne Feinstein
#63. Law is not a trade, not briefs, not merchandise, and so the heaven of commercial competition should not vulgarize the legal profession.
V. R. Krishna Iyer
#64. The legal system we have and the rule of law are far more responsible for our traditional liberties than any system of one man one vote. Any country or Government which wants to proceed towards tyranny starts to undermine legal rights and undermine the law.
Margaret Thatcher
#65. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#66. Those who challenge the law in one or another of its aspects weaken the whole legal structure of society. For one man to disobey a law he does not like is to invite others to disobey another law which he may regard as indispensable to his own livelihood - or life.
Robert Kennedy
#67. First, where the law is the major source for bioethics, morality is too easily confused with legality and moral questions too quickly reduced to legal questions. Moreover, the law is better at
telling us what not to do than at providing ends and goals worthy of our humanity.
Allen Verhey
#69. There's a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are 'legal relativists.' They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they're trying to achieve.
Jonathan Turley
#70. Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.
Ian McEwan
#72. in my four months of legal cramming I'd learned the law is full of technicalities. Technicalities are what screw up justice. Wilcox
Frank W. Abagnale
#73. Americans had to work around the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment, and more broadly around their announced traditions of equality; and in consequence their law was a law of covert devices and legal subterfuges. American law, as Krieger wrote, was a law of Umwege, devious legal pathways.
James Q. Whitman
#74. The success of any legal system is measured by its fidelity to the universal ideal of justice.
Earl Warren
#75. Why does my action strike them as so horrible? Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law ... and that's enough.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. At the heart of the American paradigm is the perception that law and its agents . . . police officers, correctional officers, attorneys and judges . . . are color-blind and thus justice is impartial, objective and seeks la verdad (the truth). But, la realidad (reality) differs.
Martin Guevara Urbina
#77. Under Florida's "stand your ground" law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground.
Dave Barry
#78. I couldn't swear that I believed in the law - or in the American legal system.
Felice Picano
#79. All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.
Sonia Sotomayor
#81. There is no room for legal hair-splitting when it comes to the humane treatment of detainees - not in a nation founded on the rule of law and respect for human rights.
Dick Durbin
#82. I will do everything by apply with all the legal and apply with the rule of law. And the main important thing that I have to be fairness to everyone, not just only one person.
Yingluck Shinawatra
#83. People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.
Edmund Burke
#84. The English practice of accommodating the rules of commercial law to commercial practice. The line of causation ran from economic need to legal response
Nathan Rosenberg
#85. My job is to interpret the law based on how the legislature and the court has done it and then, of course, to use our system of justice to develop some new legal tools and new concepts.
Bill Scott
#86. Our legal and political culture has created a bias in the law that borders on censorship against reading, displaying, or quoting the Bible.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#87. Law firms can create environments for abusive relationships. This is especially true if an attorney has no self-direction, has no independent means of financial support, and has massive student loan indebtedness. You've basically made yourself an indentured servant.
Robin D. Hart
#88. Under the gold standard gold is money and money is gold. It is immaterial whether or not the laws assign legal tender quality only to gold coins minted by the government.
Ludwig Von Mises
#89. From a legal point of view - " He shook his head. "Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage.
Richard K. Morgan
#90. Our legal system does not grant adults a right to liberty, because they already possess that right; it only revokes the right to liberty (for certain offenses) or restores it (if the deprivation did not conform to due process).
Thomas Szasz
#91. Convergence of technology and the judicial system is the need-of-the-hour. We need to go digital and adopt online analysis of legal cases. Dissemination of legal knowledge to the common man will also a go a long way in improving the law and order situation in the country.
Narendra Modi
#92. Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham
#93. There is international criminal organizations penetrating our southern based borders, and we need to do something about it. Secure the border, enforce the law, no amnesty, and go forward with the legal immigration system that gives priority to American working families and wages.
Scott Walker
#94. It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
Thomas Hobbes
#95. We need a legal code that develops like our skin during our growing years. Something both youthful and strong ... So what we humans birth might surpass without oppressing us.
Odysseas Elytis
#96. I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
Neil Gaiman
#97. In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation.
Roger Scruton
#98. Under the new law, drug busts motivated by the desire to seize cash, cars, homes, and other property are still perfectly legal.
Michelle Alexander
#99. I've always been driven by the concept of equal justice under the law, but only the rich can pay great sums of money for legal assistance and that puts them at an advantage over the poor.
Samuel Dash
#100. I believe, assume the power to decide more political than legal issues in nature, the people naturally focus less on the law and more on the lawyers that are chosen really to administer the law.
Sam Brownback
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