Edward Levi Quotes
As an instrument for practical action, law is responsive to the wisdom of its time, which may be wrong, but it carries forward, sometimes in opposition to this wisdom or passion, a memory of received values.
Levi, Edward H. Point of View: Talks on Education. University of Chicago Press, 1969.
The Senator was arguing against a bill to correct an aspect of the immigration law where infants and very young clildren are broght to the United States by parents who entered illegally. The children grow up in the United States—the only country and home that they have ever known. American law required that they be deported to “their countries” which they have no memory of and many do not even speak the language or know the culture. Sessions, is an example of the view that law defines justice. Therefore laws cannot be unjust nor can enforcing the law. Opponents point out that even in the United States we have, in earlier times, “enforced the law” which we came to regret and see as an injustice. The Fugitive slave laws, the Southern racial discrimination laws, and the law allowing Japanese American Citizens to be interned and lose their land during WWII are a few examples of laws, the enforcement of which is seen by most Americans as having been unjust. The execution of “witches” in early America was in conformity with the law.
Edward Hirsch Levi was an American law professor, academic leader, scholar, and statesman. He served as dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1950 to 1962, president of the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1975, and then as United States Attorney General in the Ford Administration. Levi is regularly cited as the "model of a modern attorney general", the "greatest lawyer of his time", and is credited with restoring order after Watergate. He is considered, along with Yale's Whitney Griswold, the greatest of postwar American university presidents.
