Legal Discrimination Quotes

When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the '70s and '80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law.

The first thing I organized around was the Central Park Five case for the young men who were accused. We talked about the unfair misrepresentation of these young teenagers in the media. I've been fighting back against Donald Trump for a long time.

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition

In the 1880s, women were decades away from earning the right to vote. Few owned property - if they were even permitted to do so. In addition to childcare obligations, many toiled in work that was either underpaid or not paid at all. Essentially, the gears of progress for women were moving slowly in just about every arena of life.

What does it amount to if the Black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law ... is to be subject to the [former] slaveholder's shotgun?

I simply didn't believe we needed a constitutional amendment to protect women's rights. I knew of only one law that was discriminatory toward women, a law in North Dakota stipulating that a wife had to have her husband's permission to make wine.

I think there are more anarchists bred in those places (lower criminal courts of New York City) than are made in the meetings of the anarchistic clubs. I think that many a man who in his heart is innocent and who is brought up by the police unfairly before a court which handles him unfairly, whatever may be the reason, goes out with a feeling of hatred toward the institutions which we desire to sustain.

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.

Men's indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

There is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlement.

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

Citizens will be disenfranchised by the law instead of served by it, and that historical progress toward a more perfect union will go backwards instead of forward.

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973.

Cap the well, yes. Clear up the mess, yes. Make compensation - yes, absolutely. But would it be right to have legislation that independently targets BP rather than other companies? I don't think that - would be right.

The protection of the writ of Habeas Corpus is denied married women in every State of this Union, notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States declares it shall not be suspended except when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety demands it.

Strict law is often great injustice.

It is ridiculous to say that Sacco and Vanzetti are being railroaded to the chair. The situation is much worse than that. This is a thing done cold-bloodedly and with deliberation. But care and deliberation do not guarantee justice.

Practices such as arranged marriages and restrictions on girls attending school have deep roots, and changing them is a gradual process. Sometimes these problems seem very far away from us here in the United States. But let's remember that even into the 20th century, an American woman could not own property or vote in national elections.

But I have to say, in my 12 years as the dean of admissions at Yale Law School, there was a lot of legal behaviour that I saw that worried me and that clearly was allowing wealthier and privileged students to tilt the balance in their favour.

Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They're relegated to a permanent undercaste.

'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'