Those people.... early stricken of God, intellectually - the departmental interpreters of the laws in Washington... can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.
How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
For as the law is set over the magistrate, even so are the magistrates set over the people. And therefore, it may be truly said, "that the magistrate is a speaking law, and the law is a silent magistrate.
Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.
Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen.
One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem,above all other sciences,is
that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable,while those of all
other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being
overthrown by newly discovered facts.
The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.