George F. Will Quotes

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

When the laws lack clarity to the point where police officers who apply them have diverging opinions on their interpretation, can we reasonably expect that ordinary citizens can figure them out?

Copyright law is too confusing.

The United States has so many laws, into the millions, that experts have lost track of just how many laws we have.

Mastering the lawless science of our law,- that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances.

It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.

When we deal with questions relating to principles of law and their applications, we do not suddenly rise into a stratosphere of icy certainty.

Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value.

Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.

Mr. Justice, there are unanswerable questions in this case.

The trouble today is that we have too many laws.

Law that is sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from lawlessness.

When a president makes up law as he goes, no one knows what the law is anymore.

All lawyers are going to have to - if we really want to attain civil justice - address the issue of how complicated we have made the laws: what we have done to ensnarl the American people in bureaucratic rules and regulations that make access to services or compliance with the law sometimes difficult, if not impossible.

I could be rearrested at any time; there could be attempts of my life. I have no idea. You are dealing with totally unpredictable people and a nation where the rule of law means nothing.

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.

That very document [Constitution] does little to serve people when Supreme Court decisions are written so that even high-priced lawyers can't figure them out.

Corruptisima republica plurimae leges.

The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

Law must be viewed as a formless mass of isolated decisions.

We are still a nation of laws. You just have to check with Barack Obama every day to see what they are.

Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

To add to the confusion, some of the court's decisions involved multiple concurrences and dissents, making it hard even for lawyers and judges to figure out what the law is and why.

Justice required resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws.