Contract Law Quotes

The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Men are corrupt and will be so … laws must be invented to check and balance the original and ineradicable perversion of human nature.

A slave cannot make a contract, not even the contract of matrimony.

State-sanctioned marriage is a civil contract, period. A contract is not a judgment of moral value. It is a legal agreement between two parties that testifies to a meeting of minds between those consenting entities. It is not a religious act or rite and so has nothing to do with Adam and Eve or Steve or even Harvey.

I shall recommend … uniform laws … for all of the States, and especially for marriage, divorce, and the limitations of contracts, and such a regulation of the laws of descent and distribution of estates as will make the wife equal with the husband in authority and right, and an equal partner in the common business.

The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. It takes a broader view to-day. A promise may be lacking, and yet the whole writing may be "instinct with an obligation," imperfectly expressed. If that is so, there is a contract.

If you haven't signed anything, you cant be ripped off.

Ever since the end of Medieval feudalism, and the writings of John Locke, we have understood the importance of being able to buy and sell one's own property, including books and watches, both for reasons of economics and liberty.

When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights.

You can enforce a contract in China, but not through the legal route. You have to put pressure on in various ways.

I've signed thousands of documents, but never read them.

I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.

I am a lawyer by profession.

Marriage is reckon’d a lay contract in Carolina.

A contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated.

When a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot divest those rights. The people can act only by their agents and, within the powers conferred upon them, their acts must be considered as the acts of the people.

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.

Quid pro quo has an interesting history. It's originally a contract law term, not a criminal bribery term.

My father was a lawyer.

The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.

That there shall be no discrimination in civil rights or immunities ... on account of race ... but the inhabitants of every race ... shall have the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, and shall be subject to like punishment ... and no other

Only the checks put upon magistrates (government officials) make nations free; and only the want of such checks make them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people … And they are slaves, where the magistrates choose their own rules … and therefore most nations in the world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains

The enjoyment of civil rights, would be best and soonest obtained if every county in the land were made a little Commonwealth and their chief town a city, where the nobility and chief gentry may build houses or palaces, befitting their quality, may bear part in the government, make their own judicial laws and execute them by their elected judicatures without appeal in all things of civil government between man and man.

International treaties have escape clauses. If you don’t like the way its going, you give the requisite notice, and you get out.